Papers by Isabelle Parkinson
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 5, 2022
Historicizing Modernists, 2021
Ecloga, 2014
"Here one finds more cliques and groups than could be imagined – and such groups for instance as ... more "Here one finds more cliques and groups than could be imagined – and such groups for instance as the Fergusson-Estelle Rice group which exploits itself in Rhythm… Kandinsky is talked of among others…He has lately brought out a new magazine called Der Blaue Reiter which I shall look up – very likely they talk of modernism – and God knows they talk much about everything here.”
This presentation of the transnational modernist scene in 1912 from the position of a relative outsider reveals the contemporary consciousness of the category of ‘modernism’ as a distinct phenomenon which is paradoxically defined by the plurality of the groups which engage with it. It is now a commonplace of modernism scholarship to point out both the diverse configurations which characterise modernism and the interconnectedness of modernist networks. I would suggest, however, that the consciousness which modernist practitioners themselves had of the significance of this diversity was lost – or buried – in the later canonisation of particular forms of modernism. This paper proposes that we can understand the implications of this consciousness and the impact of its loss in two early works by Gertrude Stein: the 1909 texts ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’.
In 1912, Stein’s ‘portraits’ of Matisse and Picasso were published in Alfred Stieglitz’s American journal Camera Work. This edition of the magazine presented these texts, alongside reproductions of the artists’ work, as exemplary of the “Post-Impressionist spirit”. I would suggest that in these portraits of modernist figures Stein proposes a conception of modernism defined by diversity and multiplicity. In a discussion of these portraits and their context, I hope to show that their emphasis on multiple as opposed to authoritative theories of art and their representation of the consciousness of this as the real innovation of modernism offers a model of this early phase which reveals what is lost in its subsequent reification.
Postmodern Culture, 2018
This article analyzes the failure of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011... more This article analyzes the failure of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) to fulfil the critical action it claims to achieve through curation. Deploying Agamben's concept of the apparatus, the article looks beyond the editors' claim that curation enables an avant-garde resistance to the canonizing force of the anthology form, using data visualizations to render visible Against Expression's covert enactment of the canonization it claims to avoid. In doing so, the article also questions the potential for curatorial practices to represent any real challenge to the status quo, given curation's current function as a primary apparatus of the market.
PhD Thesis, 2017
confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been ca... more confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party's copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university.
Conference Presentations by Isabelle Parkinson
There had been a break somewhere, we were streaming through. 1
This paper engages with the theme of emergence in two ways. First, it considers the role of the p... more This paper engages with the theme of emergence in two ways. First, it considers the role of the poetry anthology in the emergence of a literary movement. Anthologies are a significant force in the authorisation of literary canons, periods, and genealogies, and our aim is to understand how the compositional processes and devices available to the anthologist are used to shape the reception of poetic practices. We will focus on a contemporary poetry anthology: Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011), a collection which seeks to draw ‘emerging literary tendencies today’ into a coherent category. This anthology problematizes its own authority, insisting on a ‘curatorial premise’ to ‘look beyond received histories.’ Our aim is to look beyond or beneath these claims to capture the ways in which the anthology maps ‘Conceptual Writing’ as an emerging phenomenon, and to ask how far the anthology tracks, and how far it orchestrates this ‘emergence.’
Second, this study works from the hypothesis, following Franco Moretti, that it is only through a ‘distant reading’ of the text that this kind of understanding can emerge. We ask how far data visualisation tools drawn from the field of statistical analysis can capture significant underlying patterns in the text which are obscured by other, more overt, compositional devices. In using these forms of analysis, we seek to ascertain how far the patterns which emerge reveal a covert enactment of the very authorisation the anthology seeks to avoid.
"2d. Sophocles wanted a true language in which things were ontologically nominal. This is true in... more "2d. Sophocles wanted a true language in which things were ontologically nominal. This is true in fiction and history.
Fiction meaning poetry.
Poetry meaning history.
History meaning the future state of having been.
This is the job of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans."
In Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), quoted above, in Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius (2010), in Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) and in many other instances, Gertrude Stein is claimed as the modernist progenitor for conceptual poetry, and her work is cited as an originating example of conceptual writing. This paper will consider the cogency of this reading of Stein’s work and engage critically with the notion of origin upon which such claims are founded. The paper asks two questions. First: in which ways can Stein be considered as a progenitor for conceptual poetry? Second: in proposing such a genealogy for itself, what history of modernism is conceptual poetry writing?
In order to explore these questions, the paper examines Kim Rosenfield’s 2008 book re: evolution and Gertrude Stein’s 1926 unpublished text ‘Natural Phenomena.’ Both texts provide a reworking of the Darwinian progressive model, reimagining notions of origin, genealogy and evolution. These texts, I would suggest, coincide in a number of related ways: in their resistance to a comprehensive taxonomy, in their emphasis on the multiplicity of strains, and in their rejection of an authoritative position from which to rewrite the past. The paper argues that both these texts therefore postulate the impossibility of an authentic recuperation of origins, and that, in those conditions, tracing a genealogy becomes an act of composition. The paper further argues that modernism’s concern over its genealogy, fossilized in the high modernist canon, is regenerated in conceptual poetry’s creative rewriting of literary history.
Book Reviews by Isabelle Parkinson
Women: A Cultural Review, 2019
Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity argues for a new conception of Stein’s writing and activity on ... more Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity argues for a new conception of Stein’s writing and activity on the modernist cultural scene as manifestations of her shifting, fluid and complex engagements with masculine identity. The book challenges ‘the assumption that she identified as a woman’ and rethinks the established scholarly view of Stein as a queer author, nuancing and refining this identification by deploying the category of transmasculinity (8). Emphasizing the transitive rather than ascribing a desire for permanent transition, Coffman insists on the instability of Stein’s identification with masculinity, retaining the troubling of categories that queerness affords whilst enabling a greater precision in exploring Stein’s gender and its significance for her authorship. Importantly, it also counters the view that Stein’s masculine identifications exemplify either a self-hating abjection or an anti-feminism that might sit uneasily with her overt rejection of patriarchy. Coffman argues that Stein’s gender is formulated through relationality, defined and redefined through a series of fluctuating and multivalent intimate connections: in her homosexual relationship with her partner Alice B Toklas, and in a series of homosocial relationships with modernist men. These complex and fluctuating relationships generate shifting forms of masculine identification that shape her ‘anti-identitarian form of transmasculinity’ (9). Coffman takes an interdisciplinary approach, reading Stein’s literary texts alongside examples of visual art, curational practices and cultural artefacts through the lens of current gender theory, looking again at Stein’s queer practice and finding new traces of her transitory masculinities. The first chapter sets up the emphasis in this study on the significance of the visual and the possibilities of the queer gaze (or ‘look’, in Coffman’s refinement of terms) in both seeing Stein anew and in recognizing the network of queer looks her texts set in motion. Here, Coffman explores the ways that images of Stein are reframed to present ‘positive signs of Chris Coffman, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £80.00 hardback 9781474438094; £24.99 paperback 9781474438100
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Papers by Isabelle Parkinson
This presentation of the transnational modernist scene in 1912 from the position of a relative outsider reveals the contemporary consciousness of the category of ‘modernism’ as a distinct phenomenon which is paradoxically defined by the plurality of the groups which engage with it. It is now a commonplace of modernism scholarship to point out both the diverse configurations which characterise modernism and the interconnectedness of modernist networks. I would suggest, however, that the consciousness which modernist practitioners themselves had of the significance of this diversity was lost – or buried – in the later canonisation of particular forms of modernism. This paper proposes that we can understand the implications of this consciousness and the impact of its loss in two early works by Gertrude Stein: the 1909 texts ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’.
In 1912, Stein’s ‘portraits’ of Matisse and Picasso were published in Alfred Stieglitz’s American journal Camera Work. This edition of the magazine presented these texts, alongside reproductions of the artists’ work, as exemplary of the “Post-Impressionist spirit”. I would suggest that in these portraits of modernist figures Stein proposes a conception of modernism defined by diversity and multiplicity. In a discussion of these portraits and their context, I hope to show that their emphasis on multiple as opposed to authoritative theories of art and their representation of the consciousness of this as the real innovation of modernism offers a model of this early phase which reveals what is lost in its subsequent reification.
Conference Presentations by Isabelle Parkinson
Second, this study works from the hypothesis, following Franco Moretti, that it is only through a ‘distant reading’ of the text that this kind of understanding can emerge. We ask how far data visualisation tools drawn from the field of statistical analysis can capture significant underlying patterns in the text which are obscured by other, more overt, compositional devices. In using these forms of analysis, we seek to ascertain how far the patterns which emerge reveal a covert enactment of the very authorisation the anthology seeks to avoid.
Fiction meaning poetry.
Poetry meaning history.
History meaning the future state of having been.
This is the job of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans."
In Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), quoted above, in Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius (2010), in Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) and in many other instances, Gertrude Stein is claimed as the modernist progenitor for conceptual poetry, and her work is cited as an originating example of conceptual writing. This paper will consider the cogency of this reading of Stein’s work and engage critically with the notion of origin upon which such claims are founded. The paper asks two questions. First: in which ways can Stein be considered as a progenitor for conceptual poetry? Second: in proposing such a genealogy for itself, what history of modernism is conceptual poetry writing?
In order to explore these questions, the paper examines Kim Rosenfield’s 2008 book re: evolution and Gertrude Stein’s 1926 unpublished text ‘Natural Phenomena.’ Both texts provide a reworking of the Darwinian progressive model, reimagining notions of origin, genealogy and evolution. These texts, I would suggest, coincide in a number of related ways: in their resistance to a comprehensive taxonomy, in their emphasis on the multiplicity of strains, and in their rejection of an authoritative position from which to rewrite the past. The paper argues that both these texts therefore postulate the impossibility of an authentic recuperation of origins, and that, in those conditions, tracing a genealogy becomes an act of composition. The paper further argues that modernism’s concern over its genealogy, fossilized in the high modernist canon, is regenerated in conceptual poetry’s creative rewriting of literary history.
Book Reviews by Isabelle Parkinson
This presentation of the transnational modernist scene in 1912 from the position of a relative outsider reveals the contemporary consciousness of the category of ‘modernism’ as a distinct phenomenon which is paradoxically defined by the plurality of the groups which engage with it. It is now a commonplace of modernism scholarship to point out both the diverse configurations which characterise modernism and the interconnectedness of modernist networks. I would suggest, however, that the consciousness which modernist practitioners themselves had of the significance of this diversity was lost – or buried – in the later canonisation of particular forms of modernism. This paper proposes that we can understand the implications of this consciousness and the impact of its loss in two early works by Gertrude Stein: the 1909 texts ‘Matisse’ and ‘Picasso’.
In 1912, Stein’s ‘portraits’ of Matisse and Picasso were published in Alfred Stieglitz’s American journal Camera Work. This edition of the magazine presented these texts, alongside reproductions of the artists’ work, as exemplary of the “Post-Impressionist spirit”. I would suggest that in these portraits of modernist figures Stein proposes a conception of modernism defined by diversity and multiplicity. In a discussion of these portraits and their context, I hope to show that their emphasis on multiple as opposed to authoritative theories of art and their representation of the consciousness of this as the real innovation of modernism offers a model of this early phase which reveals what is lost in its subsequent reification.
Second, this study works from the hypothesis, following Franco Moretti, that it is only through a ‘distant reading’ of the text that this kind of understanding can emerge. We ask how far data visualisation tools drawn from the field of statistical analysis can capture significant underlying patterns in the text which are obscured by other, more overt, compositional devices. In using these forms of analysis, we seek to ascertain how far the patterns which emerge reveal a covert enactment of the very authorisation the anthology seeks to avoid.
Fiction meaning poetry.
Poetry meaning history.
History meaning the future state of having been.
This is the job of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans."
In Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), quoted above, in Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius (2010), in Kenneth Goldsmith’s introduction to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) and in many other instances, Gertrude Stein is claimed as the modernist progenitor for conceptual poetry, and her work is cited as an originating example of conceptual writing. This paper will consider the cogency of this reading of Stein’s work and engage critically with the notion of origin upon which such claims are founded. The paper asks two questions. First: in which ways can Stein be considered as a progenitor for conceptual poetry? Second: in proposing such a genealogy for itself, what history of modernism is conceptual poetry writing?
In order to explore these questions, the paper examines Kim Rosenfield’s 2008 book re: evolution and Gertrude Stein’s 1926 unpublished text ‘Natural Phenomena.’ Both texts provide a reworking of the Darwinian progressive model, reimagining notions of origin, genealogy and evolution. These texts, I would suggest, coincide in a number of related ways: in their resistance to a comprehensive taxonomy, in their emphasis on the multiplicity of strains, and in their rejection of an authoritative position from which to rewrite the past. The paper argues that both these texts therefore postulate the impossibility of an authentic recuperation of origins, and that, in those conditions, tracing a genealogy becomes an act of composition. The paper further argues that modernism’s concern over its genealogy, fossilized in the high modernist canon, is regenerated in conceptual poetry’s creative rewriting of literary history.