복합장르 텍스트와 영미문학교육

Multigenre Texts and Literary Pedagogy: The Case of William Carlos Williams s Spring and All

This essay examines the serial form of Williams Carlos Williams’s Spring and All. A handful of critics have argued that the twenty-seven poems in the book comprise a serial poem. Taking this as a starting point, this essay analyzes how serial poetics operate on multiple levels of the book: between words, between lines, and between poems. The seriality of the poems, however, is complicated by the prose sections of Spring and All. The prose sections of the book cut across the seriality of the poems, creating and dissolving smaller fields of poems. At the same time, the prose initiates its own seriality, allowing poems to interrupt its flow but always coming back to the subject under discussion. Similar to a polyrythmic composition, the complex seriality of Spring and All requires the readers to maintain in their minds the on-going quality of both the prose sections and the poems. The text thus calls for active reading, just as the main beat of a polyrhythmic composition is realized through the listener’s nodding head, snapping fingers, or dancing feet. The complex and dynamic structure of the book is the result of Williams’s experimental spirit that pushes at the limits of the aesthetic possibilities offered by the serial form. The final section of this essay suggests ways in which Spring and All can be taught in the classroom.