ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin's philosophical history of modernity might seem far removed, in conceptual terms, from William James's pragmatism but it is author's contention that Marianne Moore's poetry might be understood as an aesthetic fusion and expression of these two distinct philosophical traditions. It is Moore's method of composition with its predilection for scraps, that suggests an affinity between what Benjamin refers to as the montage principle and what James describes in terms of 'partial stories'. While Moore's preference for the fragment signals her resistance to the "monumental" discourses of modernity and allies her to the Benjaminian collector, her opposition to overarching theories and structures came from her reading of William James. This chapter concludes with an account of Moore's feminist reinterpretation of Jamesian pragmatism. It was James who led Moore to the fragment, who provided her with a strategy capable of testing forms of faith and subverting patriarchal literary authority.
