Art and Science in the Shadow of WWII

FAIN: FT-230086-15

Tony Dimitrios Barnstone
Whittier College (Whittier, CA 90601-4446)

Summer research and writing on American Literature and Studies, and History of Science.

In my application for the N.E.H. Summer Stipend, I propose to spend two months reworking the third large section of my large research project, The Religion of Science and the Religion of Art: William Carlos Williams and the Machine Age Modernists. I have completed a draft of the section, and plan to use the time tightening the argument, reading and incorporating a number of new books and articles, and creating three end products: a completed draft of the section for book publication, and an excerpting of parts of the section into two articles ("Machines Made Out of Words" and "The Apocalypse Machine.") In several ways, this research project is in line with the funding priorities of the N.E.H. (funding for faculty at HSIs; Bridging Cultures; and Standing Together: The Experience of War).

Associated Products

Ivory Towers and War Machines: William Carlos Williams and the Humanities under Fire (Article)
Title: Ivory Towers and War Machines: William Carlos Williams and the Humanities under Fire
Author: Tony Barnstone
Abstract: In lieu of an abstract: an early paragraph in the article: William Carlos Williams saw the world-wide convulsion of the Second World War as an opportunity to break up old oppressive orders and create a new order, but—despite his political rhetoric—by this he didn’t mean replacing fascism with democracy, but rather a replacing of traditional metrics with avant-garde forms of ordering the poem. Williams’s loyalty to the cause of the avant-garde was extreme enough that he showed little sympathy for those academics he saw covertly “digging,” even if it meant that they were to be gassed out of their trenches in the universities by a wartime shift of values toward practical education. For Williams, the poem must be reinvented as both practical and impractical, both machine and flower, in order to save us from a dehumanized machine consciousness that he associates with both the Germans and the Academy.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/554230/pdf
Primary URL Description: WCW Review Direct Link to Article
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Publisher: William Carlos Williams Review

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