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FORMATTING REFERENCES IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE MLA STYLE

GUIDE: A SAMPLE
1. QUOTATIONS
Printed sources:
#1
In Two Interviews on Science and Literature, having been asked to express his view on the
current state of the relation of literature to science and to take sides as necessary, Italo Calvino
confesses:
What interests me is the whole mosaic in which man is set, the interplay of
relationships, the design that emerges from the squiggles on the carpet. (99)
A writer who has not refrained from integrating scientific theories in his creative work, quite often
with a playful-ironic twist of meaning, Calvino adopts a stance on this question that echoes the
universalist approach of a renaissance figure. In his view, there are several elements that make
literature and science allies in their specific enterprises targeted towards deciphering, understanding
and appreciating the world. Nowadays, Calvino goes on, they both share a suspicion toward an
absolute code of references, being involved in a continuous questioning of their conventions and,
above all, of their rhetorical, discursive, and linguistic strategies (29).
#2
Modernist poetry is but one of the multitudes of human exercises that have called in the course
of time for the necessity to find a more unifying approach to the changing realities, searching, at the
same time, for adequate ways to verbalise the challenges this has posed. While most Modernist
poets were constantly engaged in what Stevens called the act of finding / What will suffice (CP
239), their preoccupations were by no means singular. In fact, such endeavours should not be seen
as mere aesthetic or formalising preoccupations.
#3
Thus, as later poets have admitted from the safer vantage point granted by historical distancing
and the further accumulation of knowledge, in this novel design the experience of poetry may
become synonymous with a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things
as they are and ultimately to a larger, more complex picture of things in their becoming (Swenson
185). For the Modernist artist this called for revitalising poetry (or reinventing it, as necessary), not
so much based on using mind over matter (in a fashion that would have been reminiscent of the
deprecated Enlightenment project for a complete mathesis), as on a harmonising of the two. To use
one of Yeatss poetic images, we may argue that Modernist poetry had to learn to function as a
thinking of the body (qtd. in Swenson 185).

#4
As Sonesson (3-35 passim) explains, the increasing role of the subject calls for a collaboration
between the spectator and the work of art in the creation of meaning, an activity that results in the
involvement of the reader-subject in the determination of the aesthetic function.
#5
This act of abstracting demanded a number of changes on all levelsaesthetic, expressive
and formalindicative in fact of a growing preoccupation for fusion, as a natural consequence of
the experience of a discontiguous reality. Thus, echoing the painters distrust of depiction,
Modernist writers developed a penchant for ambiguous images that allowed for a multiplicity of
interpretations (the city, the machine or the apocalyptic moment). At a technical level, these
implied the adoption of new compositional strategies, such as ellipsis, parataxis and juxtaposition
(Bradbury and McFarlane 48-49).
#6
As Stevenss own view in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven suggests, this is equal to
admitting that the point of vision and desire are the same (CP 466). A further blurring of
distinctions can be seen in the union of sight and motion, as
the eyes logic guarantees [] that representation can always be folded back onto itself,
in a miming that renders itself transparent to the original, transforming representation
into a calling up of the original in a continually renewed presentation of it. (Krauss 295)
The implication of this condition of non-separability (to borrow another term from quantum
physics) is that a forever renewable present is createda desire that can never be satisfied,
calling for its continual gratification, like the feeling that pervades much of Eliots images of
fragmented cityscapes or, as we shall see in the next chapter, one of the major causes for the
survival of dualism in Stevenss poetry.
Web sources:
Thus, as W. Stephen Croddy remarks (1998), the search for definitions that can capture the
valences of Modernism in its multifarious modes of expression should reach far beyond the
immediate goals and methods of the literary critic. While an understanding of modernity in art
can be of immediate help to the student of literature, the insights one gains from studying its
manifestations should not be limited to the narrower textual or socio-historical investigation. As the
author further argues, explanations of Modernism should consider the cultural-philosophical aspect
of the problem as well, since they may ultimately prove important not only for aesthetics, but also
for epistemology (par. 1).

2. BIBLIOGRAPHIES:
1.

Aiken, Conrad. Poetry and the Mind of Modern Man. Contemporary American Poetry.
Voice of America Forum Lectures. Ed. Howard Nemerov. Washington: USICA, 1979. 19.

2.

Aine, Kelly. Wallace Stevens: the Impossible Possible Philosophers Man. Philosophy
Pathways Electronic Journal 126. Ed. Geoffrey Klempner. (12th April 2007). 7 May
2009.
<http: //www.philosophypathways.com/newsletter/issue126.html>.

3.

Aitken, Robert. Wallace Stevens and Zen. The Wallace Stevens Journal 6.3/4 (1982): 6973.

4.

Alsen, Eberhard, ed. The New Romanticism. A Collection of Critical Essays. Routledge,
2000.

5.

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge, London
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

6.

--- . From Two Wordsworths to One Contemporary Poetics. Romantic Circles Praxis
Series. (June 2003). Ed. Orrin Wang and John Morillo. University of Maryland Press,
2003.

7.

Arnold, Matthew. The Study of Poetry. Essays in Criticism, Second Series. (1888) repr.
London: Dent, 1964.

8.

Calvino, Italo. Two Interviews on Science and Literature. The Uses of Literature. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986.

9.

Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel. Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York:
Vintage Books, 1965.

10.

--- . Letters of Wallace Stevens. Selected and edited by Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1966.

11.

--- . The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New
York: Vintage Books, 1972.

12.

--- . Collected Poems. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984.

13.

--- . Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

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