ABSTRACT
KENNER’s early pioneering study was an attempt to situate Lewis among the formative artists of the early twentieth century, and his importance is underlined by the fact that he wrote so extensively on the Zeitgeist. Kenner identifies a series of Lewis surrogates running through his fiction who are engaged in an ongoing struggle against time, and he labels as “Vorticist prose” a kind of sentence Lewis devised in the 1910s. This prose minimizes the function of verbs to represent action and relocates dynamism in combinations and sequences of words. Kenner argues that in Lewis the self is defined by function and that the latter’s polemics tend to be rhetorical and not the result of deep thought. The brevity of his study, however, does not really enable him to demonstrate this characteristic in any detail. Finally, Kenner sees The Vulgar Streak as marking the high point in Lewis’s late period for its investigation of phoneyness.
