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- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 270-282
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
As defined by T. S. Eliot in ‘Hamlet’ (1919):
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
Its role is principally related to producing art IMPERSONALLY, as a technique for turning emotional excess into precise feelings grounded on external fact. It is a great example of Eliot's early genius for the critical soundbite, but does not translate into precise critical use. Its importance lies elsewhere. Behind the cold scientific posturing of this formula crouch crucial psychotherapeutic overtones. Eliot may have seen in Hamlet's problems the diagnosis of his own impending breakdown that would soon send him to Dr Vittoz for therapy in Switzerland while writing The Waste Land (1922). It is modernist art as record of mental disorder in search of cognitive structure grounded in sensory experience. It soon, however, crystallises as the basis for a deliberate ideological position. Eliot's insistence ‘that men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves’ in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), what he calls ‘Outside Authority’, is the political version of the objective correlative.
READING
Eliot, T. S. (1999) ‘Hamlet’ (1919), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber.
Eliot, T. S. (1999), ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber.
OBJECTIVISM
Although the Objectivist poets emerged as a group in the early 1930s, William Carlos Williams's line ‘No ideas but in things’ from the 1927 version of his long poem Paterson was already seen among his contemporaries as a summary of the main poetic EXPERIMENTS in the twentieth century.
The Objectivists’ main literary and political views were affected by massive unemployment and social unrest in the USA and by the rise of fascism in Europe. They were also influenced by the representatives of IMAGISM such as Ezra Pound. The four leading Objectivists – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff – saw a poem as an artefact that presents the modality of things seen as an immediate structure of relations.
M
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 216-248
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
MACHINE
By the end of the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Industrial Revolution had turned the machine from a means of production into a sociocultural icon. To the modernist artists the machine offers itself as an IMPERSONAL model and an alternative to aesthetic convention, if also viewed with certain distrust. T. E. Hulme, for example, hailed the advent of ABSTRACT aesthetics, yet feared that machines would take too much credit for it. The machine is most explicitly embraced by the avant-garde, epitomised by FUTURISM in Italy and VORTICISM in England, as a radical commitment to the future opened by TECHNOLOGY. WAR did much to reinvest the perception of the machine with suspicion, turning its potential for impersonality into dehumanisation and death, both literal and cultural, but also political because complicit with the oppressive management of the human mode of production by the forces of consumer capitalism. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) is a poignant parody of such mechanical dehumanisation. It did not deter Ezra Pound, however, who continued to idealise machine parts in his pamphlet ‘Machine Art’ (1930) as the very natural poetic object that had eluded his IMAGIST project.
READING
Hulme, T. E. (1998) ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ [1914], in Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuiness. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Lewis, Wyndham et al. (1998) ‘Long Live the Vortex’ [1918], in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Olga Taxidou and Jane Goldman (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Pound, Ezra (1996) Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
MADELEINE
In Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) the first volume of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27), the narrator recalls the experience of drinking a tisane to alleviate the winter cold, at the urging of his mother; with it is served a small scalloped cake or petite madeleine, untasted since childhood. Soaked in the tea, the taste of this morsel unlocks a fleeting sensation that is the involuntary MEMORY of his past in Combray and from that ‘madeleine’ Proust's epic of modernism proceeds. Involuntary memory is distinct from voluntary memory in that it arises unbidden and provides access to a different order of time in which the past can be recovered in the present.