The Laura Riding Question: Modernism, Poetry, and Truth

Abstract

Ella Zohar Ophir is lecturer at the University of Toronto. Forthcoming essays include a study of the fictions of Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis and an inquiry into modernist treatments of everyday life.

Riding's poetry in the Theory of Gynocriticism

“…Some critics know her as modernist, however, "In the new Rothenberg and Joris anthology, Poems for the Millennium, she now has one poem and her poetics is referred to as antimodernist" [11]. But Riding discusses against empiricism; "empiricism is that as a model of knowledge, it precludes all other models of knowledge and so, necessarily, of truth" [9]. Although, she does not know herself as a modernist, she uses the form of modernist poetry.…”

“…Jerome McGann, in his essay; Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Literal Truth, elaborates historically, the relation of language and truth, and how these two are not separable. McGann understands Riding's poetry as "a continuation of modernism in which constructivism emphasizes on the words," [9] and thus she is as a pioneer of the experimental poetry of the first decades of the 20th century. Additionally, Heuving considers Riding's view to construct a new poetics in relation to comparable responsibility to critics; she also finds in Riding's poetry especially feminist principles and practices and links her, on these grounds, to Gertrude Stein.…”