Susan Rosenbaum | The University of Georgia (original) (raw)
Papers by Susan Rosenbaum
Humanities, 2022
In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by F... more In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape on the page but moved beyond it. Following Kiesler’s 1965 death, Guest published a poem in 1968 inspired by Kiesler’s “Galaxy” structures, titled “Homage", and included a shortened version in Durer in the Window (2003). Kiesler composed a number of works under the name “Galaxies”, all of which shared an interest in merging architecture with other art forms, including sculpture, mobiles, drawing, and painting. In “Homage”, Guest was less interested in describing Kiesler’s “Galaxies” than in building a commensurate architecture of the page, dependent on the spatial arrangement of lines and stanzas, the visual impact of white space, and the reader’s imaginative navigation of both. Putting Kiesler’s “Galaxies” and Guest’s “Homage” in dialogue illuminates a model of inter-arts reception as co-creation or what Kiesler called “Correalism” that depends on the spatial dimensions of the poetic imagination. Both works can be understood as open, mobile, “museums without walls” that anticipate the future by inviting dynamic collaboration and future transformation. Finally, I argue that the relationship between these works models the kind of affiliation important to experimental women artists and poets such as Guest, affiliations that helped form an En Dehors Garde “in the shadow” of the avant-garde.
Sincerity - the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of... more Sincerity - the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of the author - has dominated both the reading and the writing of Anglo-American poetry since the romantic era. Most critical studies have unheld an opposition between sincerity and the literary marketplace, contributing to the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture. Guided by the question of why we expect poetry to be sincere, Susan Rosenbaum reveals in "Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading" that, in fact, sincerity in the modern lyric was in many ways a product of commercial culture. As she demonstrates, poets who made a living from their writing both sold the moral promise that their lyrics were sincere and commented on this conflict in their work. Juxtaposing the poetry of Wordsworth and Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld a...
Reading Elizabeth Bishop
This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Arrival at Santos’, with its famously odd breakage of... more This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Arrival at Santos’, with its famously odd breakage of the letter S from the word falls (‘Glen Fall / s, New York’), as an experiment in visual poetry shaped by the work of the international avant-garde. The breaking of a word between consonants is unusual for Bishop, but it was not at all unusual for her avant-garde precursors and peers. Scholars have explored Bishop’s relation to the visual arts as a painter of watercolors, as a lifelong student of modernist painting, sculpture, and architecture, and as a writer who derived poetic strategies from the visual arts and wrote many ekphrastic poems. However, we have paid less attention to the importance of the visual design and spatial layout of Bishop’s poems in the context of avant-garde experiments with visual poetry.
Feminist Modernist Studies
ABSTRACT In Part 1, we contend that design is fundamental to feminist digital humanities. “Design... more ABSTRACT In Part 1, we contend that design is fundamental to feminist digital humanities. “Design” refers to structures and to the process of inventing them; it also encompasses matters of style and aesthetics. If modernist studies is to thrive in a digital age, we must attend to questions of style and UX (user experience) design. To give design its due is a feminist act. It involves considering the audience’s needs and interests, recognizing them as partners in the scholarly endeavor, and embracing style and aesthetics as crucial to the work of digital humanities. Feminist design also entails rethinking the processes of generating and disseminating knowledge and reinventing our scholarly methods in order to break down hierarchies, encourage open exchanges of expertise, and reflect the diversity of human creative production. In Part II, we discuss Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, an experiment in modernist digital humanities that aims to move questions of design from the periphery to the center of scholarly attention (http://mina-loy.com/). Loy serves not only as a representative of women in the avant-garde, but also as a model for what digital humanists can be, if, like Loy, we dare to design radically new forms and processes.
Visualities Forum, Ed. Alix Beeston, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus , 2020
https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/handiwork
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill et al. Davidson College, 2019. https://mina-loy.com., 2019
Susan Rosenbaum considers transformations in Loy’s relationship to Dada and Surrealism when she m... more Susan Rosenbaum considers transformations in Loy’s relationship to Dada and Surrealism when she moved to New York City for the second time. This chapter does not approach Loy’s late work as a falling off from an earlier European “avant-garde” moment, but as an active working through of ideas and techniques Loy had absorbed from Dada and Surrealism, which she would continue to critique and transform during her years in New York. Loy’s struggles with aging and poverty coupled with her experience living near the Bowery and friendship with “American Surrealist” Joseph Cornell would inflect her poetry and visual art of this time with ethical vigor and spiritual reflection. This chapter considers Loy’s 1950’s collections — the publication of Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958) and the Bodley Gallery Exhibition of Loy’s Constructions (1959) — in the context of the post-1945 American avant-garde and its histories.
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill et al. Davidson College, 2019. https://mina-loy.com., 2019
In this chapter, Susan Rosenbaum discusses Mina Loy’s relationship to the Surrealist movement in ... more In this chapter, Susan Rosenbaum discusses Mina Loy’s relationship to the Surrealist movement in Paris and her role in Surrealism’s trans-Atlantic crossing, including her work as Paris agent for the Julien Levy Gallery. Rosenbaum addresses how Loy’s poetry, fiction, visual art, objects, and designs from the 1920s and early 30s respond to and transform Surrealist ideas and techniques from the perspective of the en dehors garde. Contextualizing Loy’s work through analysis of the Surrealist movement’s treatment and representation of women, gender, and sexuality, the chapter explores connections between Loy’s work and the art and writing of other women from this era who engaged Surrealism from the movement’s margins.
In Linda A. Kinnahan, Ed. A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2... more In Linda A. Kinnahan, Ed. A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2016.
Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Eric Haralson
New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels, Ed. Mark Silverberg, 2013
A Companion to Modernist Poetry Eds. David Chinitz and Gail MacDonald, 2014
This essay surveys the “next generation,” those American and British poets born during the first ... more This essay surveys the “next generation,” those American and British poets born during the first two decades of the twentieth century whose careers and reputations were formed in the 1930s and 40s. Some of the key groups, movements, and poetic practices associated with the next generation are reviewed. As the essay considers the next generation’s adaptations of and departures from earlier modernisms, it explores the ways in which their role in literary history has been understood, and debated, by key critics and formative anthologies, particularly Donald Allen's "The New American Poetry." Studying the contestations in anthologies over the next generation’s contributions to modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde reveals the importance of this generation to understandings of modernism’s past, present, and future.
Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, Ed. Cary Nelson, 2012
Studies in Romanticism, 2001
The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, 2014
Twentieth-Century Literature, 2007
Humanities, 2022
In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by F... more In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape on the page but moved beyond it. Following Kiesler’s 1965 death, Guest published a poem in 1968 inspired by Kiesler’s “Galaxy” structures, titled “Homage", and included a shortened version in Durer in the Window (2003). Kiesler composed a number of works under the name “Galaxies”, all of which shared an interest in merging architecture with other art forms, including sculpture, mobiles, drawing, and painting. In “Homage”, Guest was less interested in describing Kiesler’s “Galaxies” than in building a commensurate architecture of the page, dependent on the spatial arrangement of lines and stanzas, the visual impact of white space, and the reader’s imaginative navigation of both. Putting Kiesler’s “Galaxies” and Guest’s “Homage” in dialogue illuminates a model of inter-arts reception as co-creation or what Kiesler called “Correalism” that depends on the spatial dimensions of the poetic imagination. Both works can be understood as open, mobile, “museums without walls” that anticipate the future by inviting dynamic collaboration and future transformation. Finally, I argue that the relationship between these works models the kind of affiliation important to experimental women artists and poets such as Guest, affiliations that helped form an En Dehors Garde “in the shadow” of the avant-garde.
Sincerity - the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of... more Sincerity - the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of the author - has dominated both the reading and the writing of Anglo-American poetry since the romantic era. Most critical studies have unheld an opposition between sincerity and the literary marketplace, contributing to the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture. Guided by the question of why we expect poetry to be sincere, Susan Rosenbaum reveals in "Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading" that, in fact, sincerity in the modern lyric was in many ways a product of commercial culture. As she demonstrates, poets who made a living from their writing both sold the moral promise that their lyrics were sincere and commented on this conflict in their work. Juxtaposing the poetry of Wordsworth and Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld a...
Reading Elizabeth Bishop
This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Arrival at Santos’, with its famously odd breakage of... more This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Arrival at Santos’, with its famously odd breakage of the letter S from the word falls (‘Glen Fall / s, New York’), as an experiment in visual poetry shaped by the work of the international avant-garde. The breaking of a word between consonants is unusual for Bishop, but it was not at all unusual for her avant-garde precursors and peers. Scholars have explored Bishop’s relation to the visual arts as a painter of watercolors, as a lifelong student of modernist painting, sculpture, and architecture, and as a writer who derived poetic strategies from the visual arts and wrote many ekphrastic poems. However, we have paid less attention to the importance of the visual design and spatial layout of Bishop’s poems in the context of avant-garde experiments with visual poetry.
Feminist Modernist Studies
ABSTRACT In Part 1, we contend that design is fundamental to feminist digital humanities. “Design... more ABSTRACT In Part 1, we contend that design is fundamental to feminist digital humanities. “Design” refers to structures and to the process of inventing them; it also encompasses matters of style and aesthetics. If modernist studies is to thrive in a digital age, we must attend to questions of style and UX (user experience) design. To give design its due is a feminist act. It involves considering the audience’s needs and interests, recognizing them as partners in the scholarly endeavor, and embracing style and aesthetics as crucial to the work of digital humanities. Feminist design also entails rethinking the processes of generating and disseminating knowledge and reinventing our scholarly methods in order to break down hierarchies, encourage open exchanges of expertise, and reflect the diversity of human creative production. In Part II, we discuss Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, an experiment in modernist digital humanities that aims to move questions of design from the periphery to the center of scholarly attention (http://mina-loy.com/). Loy serves not only as a representative of women in the avant-garde, but also as a model for what digital humanists can be, if, like Loy, we dare to design radically new forms and processes.
Visualities Forum, Ed. Alix Beeston, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus , 2020
https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/handiwork
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill et al. Davidson College, 2019. https://mina-loy.com., 2019
Susan Rosenbaum considers transformations in Loy’s relationship to Dada and Surrealism when she m... more Susan Rosenbaum considers transformations in Loy’s relationship to Dada and Surrealism when she moved to New York City for the second time. This chapter does not approach Loy’s late work as a falling off from an earlier European “avant-garde” moment, but as an active working through of ideas and techniques Loy had absorbed from Dada and Surrealism, which she would continue to critique and transform during her years in New York. Loy’s struggles with aging and poverty coupled with her experience living near the Bowery and friendship with “American Surrealist” Joseph Cornell would inflect her poetry and visual art of this time with ethical vigor and spiritual reflection. This chapter considers Loy’s 1950’s collections — the publication of Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958) and the Bodley Gallery Exhibition of Loy’s Constructions (1959) — in the context of the post-1945 American avant-garde and its histories.
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill et al. Davidson College, 2019. https://mina-loy.com., 2019
In this chapter, Susan Rosenbaum discusses Mina Loy’s relationship to the Surrealist movement in ... more In this chapter, Susan Rosenbaum discusses Mina Loy’s relationship to the Surrealist movement in Paris and her role in Surrealism’s trans-Atlantic crossing, including her work as Paris agent for the Julien Levy Gallery. Rosenbaum addresses how Loy’s poetry, fiction, visual art, objects, and designs from the 1920s and early 30s respond to and transform Surrealist ideas and techniques from the perspective of the en dehors garde. Contextualizing Loy’s work through analysis of the Surrealist movement’s treatment and representation of women, gender, and sexuality, the chapter explores connections between Loy’s work and the art and writing of other women from this era who engaged Surrealism from the movement’s margins.
In Linda A. Kinnahan, Ed. A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2... more In Linda A. Kinnahan, Ed. A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2016.
Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Ed. Eric Haralson
New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels, Ed. Mark Silverberg, 2013
A Companion to Modernist Poetry Eds. David Chinitz and Gail MacDonald, 2014
This essay surveys the “next generation,” those American and British poets born during the first ... more This essay surveys the “next generation,” those American and British poets born during the first two decades of the twentieth century whose careers and reputations were formed in the 1930s and 40s. Some of the key groups, movements, and poetic practices associated with the next generation are reviewed. As the essay considers the next generation’s adaptations of and departures from earlier modernisms, it explores the ways in which their role in literary history has been understood, and debated, by key critics and formative anthologies, particularly Donald Allen's "The New American Poetry." Studying the contestations in anthologies over the next generation’s contributions to modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde reveals the importance of this generation to understandings of modernism’s past, present, and future.
Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, Ed. Cary Nelson, 2012
Studies in Romanticism, 2001
The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, 2014
Twentieth-Century Literature, 2007