“”Language is in its January”: Dada and William Carlos Williams’s Early Prose”.

Abstract

El artículo explora las conexiones entre el Dadaísmo y William Carlos Williams. La actitud de Williams hacia el dadaísmo fue ambivalente. Sin embargo, Williams hizo mucho uso delas radicales estrategias para componer cuatro de sus obras más experimentales y menos estudiada: Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), The Great American Novel (1923), y the purely Dadaist A Novelette (1932). El Dadaísmo proporcionó a Williams las técnicas (irracionalidad, parodia, contradicción, juego, confrontación, escritura automática, caos) y el andamiaje conceptual que necesitaba para cumplir con su misión de aniquilar y resucitar la literatura estadounidense.

This article explores connections between Dadaism and William Carlos Williams. Williams’s attitude toward Dadaism was ambivalent. However, Williams made ample use of the radical strategies of Dadaism to compose four of his more experimental and less studied texts, namely: Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), The Great American Novel (1923), and the purely Dadaist A Novelette (1932). Dadaism provided Williams with the techniques (illogicality, collage, parody, contradiction, playfulness, confrontation, automatic writing, chaos) and the conceptual scaffolding he needed to pursue his self-appointed—and intrinsically Dadaist—mission to both wipe out and revive American literature