Robert Volpicelli graduated from Ithaca College in 2009 with an English major and an Honors minor; he is currently a Ph.D candidate and Sparks Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University. His lecture will take place on Thursday, March 24th, at 5:30 in Business 103; it springs from a larger project on "American Objects" and concerns the work of the American modernist poet Marianne Moore.
Born into a moment of mass production and consumer culture, modernism shared in--and perhaps also spurred on--the early twentieth century's obsession with objects. During the last decade, literary critics have concerned themselves with the ways in which modernists dislocated and detached ordinary objects from their original cultural milieus as a means of discovering and revealing the fascinating aesthetics of everyday things. Overlooked in this discussion, Volpicelli argues, has been the program of a poet like Marianne Moore, who saw such artistic dislocations as unsavory--even imperialistic--acts to be avoided. With her poetry, then, Moore shows us the unseen consequences of carelessly removing things from their locations and illustrates how these materials might better function at "home," in their original contexts. By putting things back into their places and intervening in the cultural logic of displacement, Moore reverses the terms usually associated with modernism, offering the reader of modern poetry a sense of homeliness rather than uncanniness, domesticity rather than disorientation, and familiarity rather than fragmentation.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20110321092814240