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The big picture behind this lecture can be summed up in a title of a book by Michael

Alan Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity.

Now, this is a say, Western modernity emerges from within a very, very long theological history. And whether we realize it or not,

our entire present horizon of intellectual problems and quandaries stems from theological decisions

and developments originating at least back as far back as the 13th and 14th centuries.

Specifically, so both Gillespie and this second useful study by Thomas Fow argue,

the seismic shift that will begin to generate modernity is the combination of nominalism,

meaning the rejection of the reality of natures, essences, universals, and voluntarism, the idea that the will is prior to and determines the intellect in both God and human beings.

William of Ockham is the most influential representative of what we will find to be a rather corrosive combination and we'll hear more about

him in a moment. I'll mostly be drawing on Gillespie and Fow in my account here so those of you

who want to know more about the background can go to those sources first and you'll find a glut

of further reading in the bibliographies. What I want to show in this lecture is how

modernist literature from the 20th century is still profoundly in the grip of the problems originally

generated by nominalism. Indeed, modernism is arguably the point in literary history where these

problems come to head, where they begin to be

confronted as a challenge to artistic language as such, issuing in radical formal experiments

that push at the limits of sense-making and sign-making. And the three modernist texts I will be

focusing on today are Samuel Beckett's weird and wonderful novel, What,

Wallace Stevens' long discursive poem Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,

and David Jones' long epic poem, The Anathematta.

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