“The End of Art” - ETD - University of Notre Dame

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encompasses histories, biographies, poetry, two novels, numerous essays, and of course the autobiography itself. But if it seems like Adams is ready to deal with the rest of what occurs in his life, then we quickly find this not to be the case. The paradox of The Education is its long and drawn- out insistence that his education is a failure. The ubiquitous message is that his great education is woefully inadequate to the changing world around him. Education is found unreliable and each lesson a disappointment, so that a “passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself” (E, 38), and “…he had to admit that nine-tenths of his acquired education was useless, and the other tenth harmful” (E, 253). The broken promise of his “Harvard Stamp” brings the realization that “four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped” (E, 55). As the book is set up, nearly every chapter concludes with the loss of one type of education or another: “his attempt at education in treason having, like all the rest, disastrously failed” (E, 109); “Education, systematic or accidental, had done its worst” (E, 313). At one point he is left feeling so disjointed that he recognizes in himself what postmodernists call a fragmented subjectivity: his “identity, if one could call a bundle of disconnected memories an identity, seemed to remain; but his life was once more broken into separate pieces; he was a spider and had to spin a new web in some new place with a new attachment” (E, 209). Adams thinks his education is a failure because it is always behind the times. “[H]is education was chiefly inheritance” (E, 26), as he writes near the beginning. It is behind the times because unprecedented developments in science, changes in economic and political power, and in the 1890s his family bankruptcy leave him feeling utterly unprepared for life: “One found one’s self in a singular frame of mind—more eighteenth-century than ever— 30
almost rococo—and unable to catch anywhere the cog-wheels of evolution”(E, 284). When he encounters an event that cannot be assimilated to his education, he describes “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new” (E, 383). It is perhaps the combination of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination that most contribute to his impression of educational failure. Consider that he devotes roughly eight full chapters to the period, as if tripping and stumbling over the war, unable to build a meaningful narrative out of it. He wonders, “What motives or emotions drove his masters on their various paths, he made no pretense of guessing motives; he knew only his own infantile ignorance, before which he stood amazed, and his innocent good-faith, always a matter of simple-minded surprise” (E, 105). He is gripped during the war by a sense that politics are controlled by forces that he is helpless to comprehend, much less affect or change: “To the end of his life he labored over the lessons then taught. Never was demonstration more tangled. Hegel’s metaphysical doctrine of the identity of opposites was simpler and easier to understand” (E, 150). Lincoln’s assassination brings about “a world so changed as to be beyond connection with the past” (E, 209). Adams was not alone in these convictions. The Civil War, which was disastrous to the idealism that his generation had inherited, led many of his contemporaries to have deep misgivings about the viability of American democracy. As Louis Menand says in The Metaphysical Club, For the generation who lived through it, the Civil War was a terrible and traumatic experience. It tore a hole in their lives. To some of them, the war seemed not just a failure of democracy, but a failure of culture, a failure of ideas. As traumatic wars do—as the First World War would do for many Europeans sixty years later—the Civil War discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it. Those beliefs had not prevented the country from going to war; they had not prepared it for the astonishing violence the war unleashed; they seemed absurdly obsolete in the new, postwar world. The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to 31
Page 1 and 2: THE INHERITED SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY A
Page 3 and 4: THE INHERITED SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY A
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS FIGURES...................
Page 7 and 8: FIGURES Figure 2.1.................
Page 9 and 10: the twentieth century sets a patter
Page 11 and 12: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost let me ext
Page 13 and 14: INTRODUCTION: THE INHERITED SELF
Page 15 and 16: Autobiography becomes a matter of i
Page 17 and 18: the century, they have mounted a pe
Page 19 and 20: impersonal, but one could argue tha
Page 21 and 22: scholars to compare and contrast ho
Page 23 and 24: mythical sources in The Maximus Poe
Page 25 and 26: inheritance as the full historical
Page 27 and 28: ecause of cryptic references to a p
Page 29 and 30: CHAPTER 1. AN ARS POETICA OF AUTOBI
Page 31 and 32: Pound was putting his full energy i
Page 33 and 34: Pound’s use of history in writing
Page 35 and 36: Even the best readers of Zukofsky h
Page 37 and 38: Zukofsky not only thought of Adams
Page 39 and 40: the element of the personal diffuse
Page 41: his patron’s wants. The tailor’
Page 45 and 46: of conceptual systems or structures
Page 47 and 48: egin at the beginning. Thus far it
Page 49 and 50: Autobiography, as he comes to see,
Page 51 and 52: made more apparent in the adjacent
Page 53 and 54: Pound has made the discovery that a
Page 55 and 56: sentiments as his early lyrical per
Page 57 and 58: effect? The question is whether the
Page 59 and 60: Pound has not abandoned his essenti
Page 61 and 62: imagine and their officers have mor
Page 63 and 64: fact that the “body intact and fo
Page 65 and 66: historical poetics. In this respect
Page 67 and 68: 1.6) Susan Howe’s “Historical I
Page 69 and 70: It should not be surprising if this
Page 71 and 72: guide and protect her. She is surro
Page 73 and 74: supposed to give him a far superior
Page 75 and 76: stories is historical determinism.
Page 77 and 78: air’; to some preoccupation of it
Page 79 and 80: CHAPTER 2. SUSAN HOWE IN THE 1970S
Page 81 and 82: his writing he invokes the tautolog
Page 83 and 84: unity rather than tension in its fo
Page 85 and 86: And I saw no temple therein: for th
Page 87 and 88: simple paintings; simplicity was th
Page 89 and 90: then von Schlegell or the interview
Page 91 and 92: discussed in “The End of Art,”
Page 93 and 94:
Classicists are people that look ou
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Smithson understands the world acco
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2.3) “A Clutter of Characters and
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Although the main body of the poem
Page 101 and 102:
Howe describes Reinhardt’s comics
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If the only goal of this chapter we
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One question is why she cites both
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American lineage, often at the expe
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eligious history in her later poems
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accessible passes roman forest crag
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Language is cited again in the last
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if the cogito is forced to constant
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in which her work would have a read
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the context of the Cold War and the
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FIGURE 2.2 India Wharf Sculpture is
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Howe’s sister, was one of the edi
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why in “Boston Harbor” the read
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All external marks of abuse are pre
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oth in poetry and in prose, is all
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whimper no far pillar for the world
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Once again David von Schegell enter
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female mariner. She has survived de
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Henry James (1843-1916) once charac
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near a blank space pointed to by tw
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CHAPTER 3. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND DOCUME
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method most vigorously hostile to t
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that events must be “set in motio
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the documents because the history i
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elating to her husband as well as t
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writing about Gaudier, but rather t
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elow, Howe identifies her inheritan
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143 FIGURE 3.1
Page 157 and 158:
145 FIGURE 3.3
Page 159 and 160:
147 FIGURE 3.5
Page 161 and 162:
sketchbooks also reveal Howe’s lo
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same kind of personal quote is foun
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esult (or peril as some might see i
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Rel. Ex. / Praise to the End - Roet
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her own efforts. In the following,
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The central problem in life is to a
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161 FIGURE 3.6
Page 175 and 176:
163 FIGURE 3.7
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have of beginnings. As I read it, H
Page 179 and 180:
quest. In the next section, I look
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Donald Hall (two on Marianne Moore)
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can be brought together and / gone
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one who strove his utmost to champi
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Punning / A Discourse to Prove the
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contemptible than to suppose public
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But here is the problem: a cry, (1)
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autobiography of an inherited self
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sketchbook, which unlike others, ha
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Beneath it Howe writes: “Why I li
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But I think the community in which
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CHAPTER 4. HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND
Page 203 and 204:
does he want to be “looking / for
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few potshots taken at the “academ
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can have no meaning but the escape
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Préface” (1946), “Bigmans” (
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and ungainly—sprawled every which
Page 213 and 214:
Mayan Letters), and the essays “P
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to find how those facts or laws det
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The New Empire, and he was rereadin
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For the first time—right now—ma
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found in his review of a book by a
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“What we need is more of the text
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exterior forces, such as by culture
Page 227 and 228:
“my king” before a sovereign en
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with Dickinson will surely be in th
Page 231 and 232:
upbringing, through the medium of S
Page 233 and 234:
could see a corresponding inheritan
Page 235 and 236:
“possible identity” of the reci
Page 237 and 238:
Eternity dawned Solitary watcher of
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anticipates the statement in My Emi
Page 241 and 242:
participating in these and other sm
Page 243 and 244:
a woman writer. Unlike Olson, for e
Page 245 and 246:
has a primacy that can never be who
Page 247 and 248:
structures or that they were intend
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constitutive of, the world, which i
Page 251 and 252:
the point, this figure has never be
Page 253 and 254:
audience should imitate or idolize
Page 255 and 256:
are recognized. “As plants conver
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when, were he in his shoes before u
Page 259 and 260:
Pound. This is unlike how Lowell ch
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Howe is probably not responding dir
Page 263 and 264:
POSTSCRIPT: NEW AUTOBIOGRAPHY I'm t
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sense of autobiography, or new auto
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existing identity, whether it is th
Page 269 and 270:
she says, “we were ‘living’ p
Page 271 and 272:
individual but rather of the limite
Page 273 and 274:
Wal*mart Gap McDonald’s J. Crew K
Page 275 and 276:
BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodore W. Pr
Page 277 and 278:
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emil
Page 279 and 280:
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Mallarmé: Se
Page 281 and 282:
Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poe
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