A visible chaos: Conflicted exchanges in Anglo-American modernism (Hilda Doolittle, Virginia Woolf, Dora Marsden, Wyndham Lewis, H.D.)

This study considers the foundational significance of visuality and debates about the image in the formation of modernism's canon. The conflicting poetics and narrative methods for communicating visibility affect the critical status of modernist figures writing from 1913--1945. I draw from literary, philosophical, and artistic sources in. order to connect the modernist image, the politics of canon formation, and the intertextual exchanges among modernists.; My introductory chapter analyzes both the self-promotion of Pound's circle---those "Men of 1914"---and the accounts which propagated its status as the origin of literary modernism. The privileging of this lineage results in two related trends in modernist criticism: first, the reaction to Pound's group entangles Anglo-American modernism with totalitarian politics. As a result of this simplifying impulse, a second trend occurs, the deemphasis on visuality as a thematic and structural principle in the period.; Since modernism privileges visual perception, H.D.'s ocular aesthetic is particularly relevant to the origins of the canon and its subsequent reception. H.D.'s poetry and prose demonstrate her belief in the capacity of visuality to affect aesthetic sensibility and to transform culture. While her modernism has been understood as developing under Pound's aegis, I posit in this chapter that her writing constructs a divergent model of visual aesthetics.; Lewis and Woolf compete to establish their particular notion of modernism as preeminent. Both writers assert a distinct model of visuality as their basis for literary production. Lewis attacks Woolf for the same aspects in her aesthetic often valorized by her critics, and I assess in this chapter these presumptions surrounding a Woolfian aesthetic, which are indicative of the sensory, political, and gendered struggle for canonical status.; Marsden's prose reflects her concern with literary modernism, especially in her philosophical essays on the nature of the image and in her arguments about time and space. Marsden's significance emerges at the forefront of. conceptual debates in Anglo-American modernist circles, and her exchanges with Williams, H.D., and Joyce transform accepted ideas about modernism.