Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory

The Importance of Constructivist Values

Charles Altieri

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780826362650
• eBook ISBN: 9780826362667
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory, Charles Altieri skillfully dissects the benefits and limitations of Materialist theory for works of art. He argues that while Materialist theory can intensify our awareness of how art can foreground sensual dimensions of experience, it does not yet serve as an adequate description of much of what we experience as mental activity—especially in the domain of art, which depends on active imaginations and constructive energies for which no Materialist theory is yet adequate. He carefully shows how constructive imaginations operate in a range of modernist poetry that is especially attentive to the mind's powers because it provides alternatives to Impressionist sensibilities, which thrive on Materialist modes of attention. These modernists turned to versions of Hegel's idea of the "inner sensuousness, " stressing how a work's very construction can provide different levels of sensuousness inseparable from the work of self-consciousness.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Modernist Innovations in the Arts Still Matter
• Chapter 1. How Modernist Transformations of the Object Affect Its Presentations of Subjectivity
• Chapter 2. The Logic of Modernist Art’s Resistance to Materialisms Old and New
• Chapter 3. Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore: Why Imagism Could Not Suffice
• Chapter 4. T. S. Eliot’s Christian Poetics and Hegel’s Ideal of Inner Sensuousness
• Chapter 5. What Is “Ordinary” about Wallace Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”?
• Chapter 6. Making the Unmaking: How John Ashbery Altered the Ambitions of Constructivist Art
• Epilogue. Why This Emphasis on Self-Consciousness Might Matter for Contemporary Thinking about the Mind
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index