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Cathay to Confucius: Ezra Pound and China

Josephine Nock-Hee Park

in Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Politics

This chapter argues that Ezra Pound's multiple invocations of China were bound to his American ambitions. Pound struggled with Whitman to take on the mantle of American bard, but he turned to the ... More

This chapter argues that Ezra Pound's multiple invocations of China were bound to his American ambitions. Pound struggled with Whitman to take on the mantle of American bard, but he turned to the Orient as a means of disciplining the homeland he had fled. Reading both Pound's early interest in Tang Dynasty verse in his Imagist poetry and his later devotion to Confucianism in the China Cantos, this chapter unveils an underlying desire to speak for and to America via the Orient that runs the length of Pound's career.Less

The Aesthetic Period (1919–1921)

Robert B. Jones

in The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer

Thie part of the book includes poems which were marked by Imagism, improvisation, and experimentation. This period in Jean Toomer's work is termed the Aesthetic period. Between 1919 and 1921, Toomer ... More

Thie part of the book includes poems which were marked by Imagism, improvisation, and experimentation. This period in Jean Toomer's work is termed the Aesthetic period. Between 1919 and 1921, Toomer experimented with several forms of poetry including haiku, lyrical impressionism, and “sound poetry.” The major influences on his artistic and philosophical development during this period were Orientalism, French and American Symbolism, and Imagism.Less

‘China is interesting, VERY’ (Ezra Pound, 1914)

Anne Witchard

in Lao She in London

The events that would shape Lao She's emergence as one of China's most important new novelists happened in London, some 15 years before he arrived there, ‘on or around 1910’, the date to which ... More

The events that would shape Lao She's emergence as one of China's most important new novelists happened in London, some 15 years before he arrived there, ‘on or around 1910’, the date to which Virginia Woolf would famously attribute the birth of modernism. This chapter outlines a trajectory of the ways in which the cultural landscape of the capital, until this point ‘extraordinarily provincial and chauvinistic’, was broadened by modernist interaction with China, taking Ezra Pound as the lynchpin of a global aesthetic exchange that, in its turn, would determine Hu Shi's prescriptions for Chinese writing after May Fourth. While China's own literary revolution would result from specific experiences of modernity that were indissoluble from the exigencies of colonialism, it was imperial expansion that gave rise to formations of artistic modernism in the West, prompted by the concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and a simultaneous access to subordinate ‘other’ cultures.Less

Machine/Art: Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, and the Chinese Written Character

R. John Williams

in The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of East and West

This chapter argues that Ernest Fenollosa's anxieties over the aesthetic tragedy of machine culture and the role of Asia's technê as an antidote to that dilemma point directly to an important ... More

This chapter argues that Ernest Fenollosa's anxieties over the aesthetic tragedy of machine culture and the role of Asia's technê as an antidote to that dilemma point directly to an important complication in the traditional story about how his theories were interpreted and disseminated by his literary executor, Ezra Pound. The typical account of Fenollosa/Pound operates under the commonsensical notion that since Pound edited, published, and continually championed Fenollosa's manuscripts, the two figures were more or less of the same mind regarding the operative dynamics of the Chinese ideograph. However, when we consider the role of the machine in—and as—art, striking discontinuities and tensions between Fenollosa and Pound begin to emerge.Less

Reed and Girdle: The Anthology in the 1920s

Gideon Nisbet

in Greek Epigram in Reception: J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805-1929

Mackail's ‘book of Greek life’ became the canon text from which post-War translators made their selections. In the meantime the Loeb series had delivered a sound edition-with-translation of the ... More

Mackail's ‘book of Greek life’ became the canon text from which post-War translators made their selections. In the meantime the Loeb series had delivered a sound edition-with-translation of the complete work, but for readers in English, ‘The Anthology’ meant Mackail. With Simonides expropriated as the predominant model for commemoration of Britain’s War dead, translators of the 1920s amplified the pastoral tone of Mackail’s ‘Chapters’, reducing the Anthology to conservative nostalgia for semi-wild Nature. Emphasizing ‘natural’ gendered behaviours brought the Anthology into contact with the New Criticism, and fostered heterosexual erotica in the smaller presses. A close reading of Shane Leslie’s mass-market Greek Anthology for Routledge (1929) concludes the volume’s timeline and exemplifies its theme of rhetorical continuities. Meanwhile, pocket-sized editions of Select Epigrams went everywhere, accruing to the genre a folksong-like aura in the world of the small press and self-published pamphlet.Less

Words: The ‘Sensuous Realist’1

in Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

As a translator of Chinese poetry, Ayscough first received attention because of her collaboration with her close friend Amy Lowell, American modernist poet. The two produced a collection of poetry in ... More

As a translator of Chinese poetry, Ayscough first received attention because of her collaboration with her close friend Amy Lowell, American modernist poet. The two produced a collection of poetry in 1921 entitled Fir Flower Tablets that brought much critical acclaim. Their work brought them directly into the sphere of influence of Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley and Witter Bynner.Less

‘And What Has All This To Do With Experimental Writing?’: Words and Ghosts

Leigh Wilson

in Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult

This chapter looks at the relationship between language and ghosts in a number of thinkers and writers in the early twentieth century. Beginning with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus ... More

This chapter looks at the relationship between language and ghosts in a number of thinkers and writers in the early twentieth century. Beginning with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and moving to C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning via Jeremy Bentham's theory of fictions, the chapter locates an anxiety about the inherent relation between words and magic. This anxiety is often expressed in a repeated return to the ghostly. The chapter goes on to show that literary modernism, from Imagism onwards, shares this sense of the relation between words and ghosts, but uses it to claim the transformative power of language. This is substantiated through readings of Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, of Mann, The Magic Mountain, and finally of book 12 of Ulysses, ‘Cyclops’, where the parodic evocation of a séance is read not as a debunking of such practices but as a claim for the transforming nature of Joyce's writing.Less

Coda: Modernist Responses

Kostas Boyiopoulos

in The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson

The variety of the Decadent image in Wilde, Symons, and Dowson, the Coda suggests, induces responses from twentieth-century Modern and Modernist poetry. The Imagist movement and its attention to form ... More

The variety of the Decadent image in Wilde, Symons, and Dowson, the Coda suggests, induces responses from twentieth-century Modern and Modernist poetry. The Imagist movement and its attention to form share much with Aesthetic form as well as with Decadent motifs. Symons’s city poetry is a crucial formative influence on T. S. Eliot’s early poetry. In the concluding section Eliot, Yeats, and Ezra Pound question the boundaries between art and life as much as they reconsider Victorian Aestheticism and Decadence: artificiality is eventually elegised, recast and re-aestheticised under a new mode of expression.Less

Aby Warburg

Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

One preliminary point which must be stated regarding Agamben’s relation to the art historian Abraham (‘Aby’) Moritz Warburg (1866–1929) is that this line of questioning is not reducible to problems ... More

One preliminary point which must be stated regarding Agamben’s relation to the art historian Abraham (‘Aby’) Moritz Warburg (1866–1929) is that this line of questioning is not reducible to problems regarding imagery or ‘visual’ art. Agamben says explicitly that ‘only the myopia of a psychologizing history of Art could have defined [Warburg’s art history] as a “science of the image”’ (ME 53). Although most scholarship on Warburg has indeed viewed the latter’s work as laying the foundations for image and visual studies, in Agamben’s account Warburg ushers the humanities towards another kind of inquiry, one having more to do with the concept of time than with any sort of imagery or visual phenomena. In this, Agamben’s reading of Warburg differs substantially from those of major art historians influenced by Warburg, such as Horst Bredekamp (Bildakt)1 or Georges Didi-Huberman (images malgré tout).2 In fact, Agamben’s reading of Warburg’s art historical inquiries can be elaborated as a fruitful critique of the recent ‘imagist’ turn in the history of art, viewing visual artworks as being primary and essentially ‘images’.Less

The Democratic Sentence

Jan Mieszkowski

in Crises of the Sentence

This chapter explores the diversity of modernist approaches to the sentence and the theory of composition. The first section examines the work of Pound, Hemingway, Woolf, and their contemporaries, ... More

This chapter explores the diversity of modernist approaches to the sentence and the theory of composition. The first section examines the work of Pound, Hemingway, Woolf, and their contemporaries, asking how far these authors were willing to go to ensure that their sentences would do what they wanted. The second section considers Gertrude Stein’s attempt to develop a praxis of writing that would not be predicated on the assumption that we know what a sentence is. Following Hemingway in trying to write texts that would make their own process of composition legible, Stein conceives of a discourse in which every part is as important as every other part because nothing, as she puts it, is part of anything else. This conception of a language of radical equality becomes the basis of her account of the rise and decline of English imperialism.Less

London

Andrew Thacker

in Modernism, Space and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London

This chapter considers how London developed as a modernist city, from the late nineteenth century to the period after World War Two. It analyses the geographical emotions produced by particular ... More

This chapter considers how London developed as a modernist city, from the late nineteenth century to the period after World War Two. It analyses the geographical emotions produced by particular locations within London, such as the London Underground and Metro-Land suburbs; the cultural institutions of Bloomsbury and Fleet Street; the bohemia of Soho and the nightlife of Piccadilly Circus; and the Notting Hill area settled by postwar immigrants to the city. It considers the affective responses of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James to the material restructuring of the city, before turning to the role of publishers, bookshops, and literary networks in helping establish modernism in the city, in the shape of poetic movements such as the Rhymers and the Imagists. The final part of the chapter analyses texts by two important outsiders in London: Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent and Sam Selvon in The Lonely Londoners.Less