The coda to Erin E. Edwards’s The Modernist Corpse cites Gertrude Stein’s attempt to excise nouns from Tender Buttons: “I struggled,” Stein writes, “with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something” (2014: 41). Edwards’s study, by contrast, begins by expunging all verbs in the first lines, which enact a roll call of famous— and infamous—dead bodies in the modernist canon. Thus abandoning the verb, the opening paragraph rushes to reawaken the corpus and its corpses, summoning As I Lay Dying’s Addie Bundren, Their Eyes Were Watching God’s Tea Cake Woods, The Sun Also Rises’ Vicente Girones, and Native Son’s Mary Dalton, among others. The urgency of the prose alongside these posthumous subjects sets the stage for the posthumanist critique to follow,...
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