The patient particulars
Subtitle: American modernism and the technique of originality
By: Christopher J. Knight.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Lewisburg; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 252
Subjects: American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) -- History -- 20th century.; Originality (Aesthetics)
Description: The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality is a literary history that focuses on four canonical texts - Stein's Tender Buttons (1914), Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), Williams's Spring and All (1923), and Moore's Observations (1924) - grouped together for the purpose of raising a question about the manner in which American literary modernism is traditionally described. Author Christopher J.

Knight is interested in the way that the classical "covenant between word and world," now considered fractured, experienced undue pressure from the modernists' earlier project to bridge the gap. With respect to the texts named, Knight argues that there is an evinced desire to think of the work as a vertical, veridical act of discovery. There is, as such, an ambition to collapse representation into presentation and even revelation; an ambition that, while quixotic, is not without formal ("the technique of originality") and political consequences.

These consequences are, in fact, the main focus of the book, and in turn, are brought forward to ask further questions about how we periodize American literary modernism(s).
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-246) and index.