For the 1967 volume of her Complete Poems, Marianne Moore preceded the section devoted to endnotes with a statement about quotation and intellectual property. "A Note on the Notes" reads as follows: "A willingness to satisfy contradictory objections to one's manner of writing might turn one's work into a donkey that finally finds itself being carried by its masters, since some readers suggest that quotation-marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task. But since in anything I have written there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest. Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes." In this project I hope to parse this statement, look at the history of "Poetry" and "The Octopus" to see how quotations operate and change across versions, and ask whether and why modern American poets like Moore who quote borrow or steal.

Moore, Marianne.  The Poems of Marianne Moore.  Ed. Grace Schulman.  New York: Penguin, 2003. 

        One of Marianne Moore's most famous poems, "Poetry," underwent radical revision over the course of its publication history, appearing first in Alfred Kreymborg's little magazine Others at thirty lines, in the spacing standard for Moore's syllabic poems.  When the poem appears for the fifth time in the second edition of Moore's first volume of poetry, Observations, the lines hug the left margin and thirteen of them remain.  Tinkering with the poem her entire life, the last authorized version appears in the 1967 Complete Poems and takes up a mere three lines.  In between the poem swelled and shrank, complicating the question of whether any version ought to be considered authortative.  Given that "Poetry" falls within the subgenre of the ars poetica, an account of quotation in Moore's poetics owes special attention to the quotations that appear in this poem.  According to Moore's endnotes, "Poetry" quotes at least Tolstoy and Yeats, the latter of which would have fallen outside the public domain.  Moore acknowledges Yeats, but she also rewrites him, leaving the status of the acknowledgement unclear. 

        The poem's most enduring phrase - "imaginary gardens with real toads / in them" - serves two important roles.  First, it models what poetry can offer.  Second, the phrase acquires quotation marks when it appears in Moore's Collected Poems, prompting the reader to identify it as an unattributed quotation.  How does the poem justify Moore's acts of quotation?  Might it also justify mis- and unattributed quotations?  And how are these three types of quotation akin to sampling?  An examination of one of Moore's most quotation-heavy poems, "The Octopus," reveals the same strange vacillation between acknowledgement and submergence.  Moore often quotes for the felicity of the expression, rather than the idea expressed - how did she imagine quotation, and why did she represent the practice so eccentrically? 

Barsanti, Michael and Evelyn Feldman.  "Paying Attention: The Rosenbach Museum's Marianne Moore Archive and the New York 
        Moderns."  Journal of Modern Literature 22.  (Autumn 1998): 7-30.

Barsanti and Feldman represent the Rosenbach Museum and Library, which houses the largest archive of Moore's writings in the country, as well a recreation of Moore's Manhattan living room.  In connection with a 1997 exhibit entitled Making It New: Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts, the two seek to give Moore's writing environment and process of composition greater public exposure.  They focus on her library of over two thousand volumes, organized according to her unique system.  Among literary works could be found books Yiddish expressions, Charlie Chaplin, religion, hunting, and natural history.  Many books contain a personal index inscribed by Moore.  Moore also kept all the various editions of her work, including manuscripts and drafts, suggesting that she wanted a record of the revisions she wrought over the years. 

Concerning Moore's process of writing, Barsanti and Feldman relay the archive's proliferation of newspaper clippings, transcribed conversations, and baseball accounts, all of which would have served as raw material for Moore's poetry.  They quote Moore describing a moment of inspiration, whereby a book calls up an association and both quotation and association survive in the finished product.  Moore refers to her poem "Marriage" as "statements that took my fancy that I tried to arrange plausibly," most of which aren't Moore's.  These material forms of "paying attention" interact with copyright law insofar as much of the language Moore mines for her poems is copyrighted, and that the practice constitutes a fundamental part of her poetics. 

Gregory, Janice.  Quotation and Modern American Poetry: "Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads."  Houston, TX: Rice UP, 1996.

        Gregory's study compares the poetics of quotation in T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore.  Quotation, she argues, either draws on the authority of what a writer quotes or parodies that same authority.  She identifies four pre-Modernist conceptions of the function of quotation, each allied with a different epoch: Christian antiquity and the medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic periods.  Apostolic and Pauline texts quote Jesus and the Old Testament to invoke the awe of revelation, the binding force of law, and to establish their own authority.  Medieval writers invoke the same authority from non-Christian authors, especially Aristotle.  The Renaissance, through figures like Erasmus and Cervantes, instigates the double character of quotation, useful for authorization and parody.  The Romantic period witnesses the rise of a discourse of originality that created immense anxiety in poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth over their belatedness in relation to great poets like Milton.  Their rare instances of quotation are in the service of transferring authority to modern, secular forces.  Setting this anxiety in an American context, Emerson insists in the 1830s that originality and quotation are not mutually exclusive, thus setting the stage for poetry that acknowledges a great debt to tradition but nevertheless seeks to establish an original relation to the universe.    

        Gregory argues that Eliot, Williams, and Moore all employ quotation to explore the way authority is gendered, particularly with reference to America's belatedness in secular history.  Borrowing on the work of Marie Borroff, Gregory demonstrates how Moore's inclusion of "promotional prose" and the text from park monuments, intimate conversations, volumes of natural history, and other non-canonical language alongside quotations from Yeats and allusions to Browning throws into question the hierarchies on which the authority of quotation rests.  These "unauthoritative" texts enter the realm of literature for multiple purposes, among them revaluation, modest depersonalization, and the establishment maternal authority.  Gregory also suggests that Moore's practice of quotation influenced T.S. Eliot, not the other way around, by convincing him that he could fashion poetry "out of a refusal to digest the fragments of the texts that inspired it."  Gregory allows me to argue that Moore's practice of quotation serves several of the analogous functions that sampling serves in music, and subsequently that there might be a causal relationship between Moore's nationality and the views she held on quotation.

Friedlander, Benjamin.  "Marianne Moore Today."  Critics and Poets on Marianne Moore: "A Right Good
        Salvo of Barks."  Ed. Leavell, Linda, Miller, Cristanne, and Robin G. Schulze.  Bucknell, PA: Bucknell UP, 2005.
        222-39.

        Friedlander solicited commentaries on the significance of Marianne Moore from contemporary avant-garde poets, with the intention of gauging exposure and tracing lines of influence.  Interspersed are his comments on the vagaries of Moore's reception, and an inchoate argument that Moore's poetry should be a lot more important to contemporary poets than it is.  Rachel Blau Duplessis calls her "a precursor without acknowledged followers," and then claims a mild affinity for the "collage textures of poetry and discursive slides" that also appear in Pound, Eliot, and Williams, but which Moore employed to feminist ends.  Jena Osman looks behind the texture of the poetry to Moore's compositional practice, admiring "her use of footnotes/citations, her delight in and recycling of newspaper items, and her ‘research-based' writing strategies," and most of all Moore's practice of inserting clippings into books dialogically, which Osman calls "material hypertext." 

        Friedlander ultimately suggests two conclusions: first, an unfair prejudice against Moore results from the popular, genteel persona she cultivated in her later years, the period when most contemporary poets came of age; second, the texture of contemporary poetry and its practice of laying bare the mediation of truth comport with Moore aesthetically and philosophically to a greater degree than with her peers.  The significance of this discussion for my project is that contemporary poets who admire Moore admire the way she samples from non-literary texts.  Arguably, then, one of the most productive aspects of Moore's poetry in the present moment intersects with one of the most discussed concepts in intellectual property law, sampling. 

This article summarizes the periods of “historical avant-gardes” in film history. Specifically, it discusses modernism as having three “coordinates”: official art of aristocratic regimes, new technology and industrial revolution’s impact on film, and the hope of social revolution. He then goes on to claim that the film theory of such movements was expressed in both written and filmic manifestos, the latter of which he offers “Zéro de Conduite” as an example.  He describes how avant-garde films were labeled such not only because of their unconventional aesthetics, but also their independent modes of production. He then divides up avant garde into three distinct movements: Impressionism, Pure Cinema, and Surrealism.  However, within the avant garde there were two distinct tendencies to achieve either a high autotelic form, or a low form that attacked art establishment. He goes on to describe surrealism as a way to link moving images with metaphorical process of automatism, the actual functioning of thought. He also mentions the Surrealist’s praise of the subversive, anarchic undercurrents in slapstick films. Finally, he discusses the potential to liberate the repressed by combining dichotomous elements of fantasy and mundane reality. By using certain cinematic techniques, Surrealists not only represented dream but also mimicked its internal structuration. Surrealists had faith in the ability of film to unleash the “liberating energies of the Unconscious.” He then discusses the Surrealist opinion of cinema as close to a dream itself, and goes on to mention many post-modernist theorists of the “dream state.”
    This article is a valuable addition to my thesis, because it provides more background on the artistic movements surrounding Vigo’s film, and how exactly he belonged to some and distinguished himself from many others. It is interesting that the author sees “Zéro” as a filmic manifesto, as its surreal opposition to and victory over the “establishment” adults in the film, and the historical context of it’s controversy and prohibition by the government would certainly support that qualification. The article’s description of the pure energy and creative force of slapstick-like humor as a threat to the establishment is very relevant to Vigo’s film, as the children’s activities and the film’s techniques exude a kind of creative, imaginative energy that eventually topples the authority of the school. The humorous, mischievous tendencies of the children are directly paralleled to the unimaginative, boring, stuffy old teachers who hardly ever smile (save Huguet). It is important to note, however, while discussing slapstick as a threat to the establishment that in the film, a “renegade” teacher named Huguet (who wears a different color coat than the rest of the teachers) plays a part in inciting this student rebellion by indulging and encouraging their silliness with imitations of Charlie Chaplin playing the Tramp in the schoolyard, or classes where he teaches standing on his head. Slapstick plays a large role in fomenting the student revolt, and it is this humor that laughed in the face of such contemporary serious crises in authority around the world, such as the Great Depression, which anarchists saw as a crisis in capitalism, one they were all-too-willing to poke fun at. There is more to discuss about Surrealism, in a later post.

Stam, Robert. "The Historical Avant-Gardes." Film Theory. New York University: New York. Blackwell Publishing, 2000. 55-58.
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Fritzsche, Peter. "Nazi Modern." Modernism/Modernity 3.11996 1-22. 1 Dec 2008 .

     The Nazis came to power because of the hopelessness of the German people due to the disastrous condition in which Germany was left following WWI. The people were not happy to see the Nazis in particular; they accepted them because they needed a change. The main goal of the Nazis was to exterminate the Jewish people, yet most Germans did not agree with this agenda.  The Nazis embraced technology and made Germany’s economy more industrialized and more technologically advanced.  Because of this some people, oversimplify the Nazis’ impact on Germany and say that they were modernizers.  The more complex view argues that Nazis were modernists.  As modernists, the Nazis sought racial purification in an attempt to unify and strengthen the German society so that it would be “strong and homogeneous enough to prosper in the dangerous era of world wars” (Fritzsche).  This racial purification in conjunction with increased social programs were measures to promote national health and were seen as modern ways to better German society.  In theory, these practices could have made German society very strong and unified, but these apparent benefits do not justify the mass murders that were made necessary to carry out the racial purification.  This racial purification, ultimately, destroyed German society because the wrath of the world for the murderous injustices Germany was committing.
    The initial background for the argument of this article is that the people were never won over by the Nazis.  This information offers a new perspective.  This lack of all out support by the people may be the reason that Goebbels and the Nazis were so concerned with maintaining public support.  If their support was a given, surely Goebbels would not have spent so many resources on propaganda like Kolberg.  The overarching goals of the Nazis for unity also explain why the public's consensus with the goals of the Nazi Party was so desirable.  In creating a unified German society, surely the Nazis not only wanted unification with race and appearance, but unification with the thoughts and minds of the German people.  The Nazis felt that this unification was key to strength in this dangerous world.  The Nazis' great desire to attain strength for the German society is explained by the way Germany was left crushed following WWI.  Overall, the desire for the unification of German society explains why such a high value was placed on propaganda and therefore, film, its most important medium.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. " Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism." Journal of Modern Literature 25.3-4 (2002):58-74.

Rabaté examines the role of surrealism in the spread of Freudian ideas. The author approaches this topic by first looking at the historical context from which the discourse emerged. While other surrealists and Freudians had become friends and collaborators, Freud and Breton had a long history of animosity between them. Unable to become friendly because of constant bickering over who deserved credit for various ideas in art and psychology, the surrealist and Freudian fields were forced to keep their distance. Breton and his followers eventually embraced the idea of hysteria and exalted the idea of guided paranoia. However, in the wake of issues within the surrealist camp as well as the events occurring in society, the majority of surrealists eventually embraced the idea of “paranoid modernism.”  Rabaté concludes the article by arguing the by embracing the idea of modernism, the surrealists, who had at one time been the enemies of Freud, were able to both take on and in turn take over many of Freud’s ideas.

The idea that the surrealist dream sequence created by Dali, which is shown in Spellbound, could be understood perfectly well by the application of Freudian principles would have been completely absurd to both Freudians and surrealists. But interestingly enough, and perhaps because of the commercial takeover of the intellectual ideas of Freud and Surrealism, the surrealist sequence appears to make complete sense to the Freudians analyzing John Ballantine within the context of the film. By creating this peaceful co-existence of ideas within the film, Spellbound itself becomes a vehicle for the dissemination not only of independent surrealist and Freudian principles, but for the idea that both ideologies are able to co-exist and ultimately act as one ideology.

On Adorno (67-8): expressive communication supressed in late capitalist society. Stravinsky, Debussy antisymphonic technique stops or spatializes time through stasis/repetition, fragmented forms of motivic development. visualization encourages externalization, listening encourages internalization. "Voided of interiority and exhausted by exterior style, the work lost its potential for transcendence, the potential that would preserve a gap for listeners to listen beyond the surface." Work recapitulates culture in which produced and shapes listeners accordingly as catatonic, infantile, frigid, unfree subject w/o will. Adorno thinks Melisande is such a subject.

"'Symphonism' had come to connote operatic excess and imbalance between the work's interior and exterior." (69) Pelleas sound as "presymphonic, declamatory and prosaic expression" (70).

Debussy wanted to leave music to work alongside words as commentary and extension (69), discrete element in opera (70).

Voice brings out interior, heard through flatness of picture, note, word. For symbolists to be musical implies move toward abstraction
(71).

Critic of Materlink's play likens it to magic lantern show "The beings that we see onstage look like shadows. They live, speak, and move in the atmosphere of artifice; they are the creatures of a dream." Description similar to Wagner's own of Bayreuth: "In the perfect drama - the full shapes of a dream-vision, or the other world, are projected before us in a life-like way as if by the magic lantern. It is a ghostly seeing in which all the figures of all times and places become distinct before our eyes. Music is the lamp of this lantern....music should be able to inspire the sight so that we see the music in shapes." (72) Hid orchestra, mechanical means by which images and sounds produced, but never singer-actors.

Symphonic (Wagner) vs. dramatic (Debussy) voice as true musicality of modern music-drama.

"A modernist masterpiece shows the fracture for what it is by exposing the illusion of a false synthesis." (78) Goehr says Pelleas first masterpiece of this kind.

Close Up, a film journal published in the years between 1927 and 1933, was the first English language journal dedicated to the cinema as an 'art.' It became the vanguard model for a certain type of writing about cinema. Close Up was the site of a range of speculations about film technology (its publication envelops the transition to sound), film style (its critics advocated a variety of national cinemas), and film subject matter (its editors fought against censorship of Soviet films and had a pioneering interest in, what they called, the 'Negro viewpoint' film.) Both critical and theoretical writing in the journal show an abiding concern with the experimental film, alternate forms of exhibition made possible by the cine-club and film-society movement, cinema as an educational tool, and serious theoretical writing (including numerous translations of articles by Eisenstein.) Many of the contributors to Close Up were writers who are known for their literary careers and not for their interest in cinema. Close Up published a strong contingent of literary women writing on cinema--H. D., Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore. The journal also included pieces by a number of prominent psychoanalysts--Hanns Sachs, Barbara Low and the sexologist Havelock Ellis. POOL, the production company which published Close Up, also sponsored several film projects. H. D. and Kenneth Macpherson, the editor-in-chief, worked on at least three film projects together. The most ambitious, a feature-length film Borderline (1930), with Paul Robeson and H. D., displays the influence of Soviet montage theory, theories which Close Up had a central role in transmitting to English-speaking audiences.

McCabe touches on Pabst passim. Of particular interest is her discussion of "H.D.'s unremitting admiration of Pabst--from Joyless Street to having 'vanquished the border-sphere' in Secrets of a Soul" (162). McCabe suggests that H.D. was attracted to Pabst's "feminine" film style which influenced her own film aesthetic.

Steven Watts argues a positive view of Disney’s importance in American history, although acknowledges the difficulty of understanding his impact on modern American culture. Many critics believe that Disney’s commercial success and popularity mean that his films cannot have cultural significance. In addition, the strong contradictory opinions of Disney make it difficult to simply look at his impact in order to gain understanding rather than to criticize or admire his work. Watts looks at Walt Disney as an artist of sentimental modernist films and as a promoter of American ideals, qualities that are evident in Disney’s rendering of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

America’s original perception of Disney was of a serious artist, inspired by both modernist art and sentimental realism. These two often contradictory influences show in his work. He blurred the line of reality and imagination by creating worlds where animals could talk, plants were animated, and household objects felt emotion. In Snow White, the forest through which the banished girl flees has trees which try to grab and trip her, but nearby, kind animals prepare to comfort her. In addition, he incorporated dreams often in his work. Walt Disney encouraged naturalism to a degree unheard of in animation and cartoons. He insisted that his animators take evening art classes and he invented the multiplane camera, which created the illusion of depth in Snow White and his other animated feature films.

Disney also used his films to imbue hope and to promote certain virtues to his audience during the depression. His films in the 1930’s remind Americans that they will overcome the hard times through vigor and virtue. Two Disney films in the ‘30s stand out in particular for encouraging the persistence and courage of underdogs. Three Little Pigs (1933) features the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” while the dwarves in Snow White (1937) merrily sing “Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go.” Snow White, too, exhibits a hard-working demeanor both in her house and the dwarves’. Disney claims that “wisdom and courage is enough to defeat big, bad wolves of every description, and send them slinking away.” Through his films, he encouraged self-reliance, a quality that he had exhibited since his youth.

Analysis across a variety of relevant feminist theory.

Norris, Margot. “Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.”  MFS Modern Fiction Studies 44:3 (1998): 730 - 766

 

 

            Margot Norris fully examines and reviews Coppola’s extraordinary film in this article.  She attempts to voice Francis Ford Coppola’s critique on the Vietnam War not only through the dialogue inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but also through the undermining themes and images of the film itself.  Even though most people contend that Apocalypse Now is a loose interpretation of Heart of Darkness, Norris claims that some of the seemingly random and meaningless scenes in Apocalypse Now actually mirror themes and passages from Conrad’s novella.  She dives deep into the psychedelic and dark imagery of Apocalypse Now and analyzes not only the changes made by Coppola and screenwriter John Milius, but also the true meaning of scenes and images that can be directly traced to Heart of Darkness.

            One of the main differences Norris finds between the source novella Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now can be found in the character changes and the implications meant by these changes. The change in setting also stands as one of the most glaring differences.  Norris contends that changing Marlow (a company man) to Willard (a military man), the accountant (a flamboyant ridiculous symbol of colonialism) to Lt. Colonel Kilgore (a ridiculous man of carnage), and the setting of colonial Africa to war torn Vietnam and Cambodia was meant by Coppola to comment mainly on the darkness and evils of man’s violence, exemplified by the Vietnam War.