Abstract
In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams asserts that his readers’ perception is alienated from the world by a “barrier.” In particular, he argues that these readers are alienated from the present moment. This state of alienation is affected and maintained, in part, by a version of false art, which Williams deems the “the beautiful illusion.” In this thesis, I argue that Spring and All is Williams’s attempt to both articulate the alienation problem through the text’s prose and resolve the problem by creating the present moment through the text’s poems, thus presenting readers the opportunity to remove “the barrier” to their perception of the world.
In order to provide a framework for theorizing about our perception of temporality, I turn to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s essay, “The Sublime and the Avant Garde,” for his philosophy of the present moment. Lyotard’s essay, which theorizes the impulse driving modernism, characterizes the present moment as simply “the event,” an occurrence preceding our understanding of what that occurrence means. Lyotard argues that such an artist event is sublime in its incommensurability to our understanding, demonstrating the notion that something, rather than nothing has occurred. I argue that the stake of Williams’s aesthetic in Spring and All is embedded in this impulse. I examine how the impulse to create the present moment is at work in four of the text’s poems, revealing that Spring and All is firmly set within the modernist impulse that Lyotard articulates.
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