Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity

by Paul Stasi (Editor), Josephine Park (Editor)

Overview

Was Ezra Pound the first theorist of world literature? Or did he inaugurate a form of comparative literature that could save the discipline from its untimely demise? Would he have welcomed the 2008 financial crisis? What might he say about America's economic dependence on China? Would he have been appalled at the rise of the “digital humanities,” or found it amenable to his own quasi-social scientific views about the role of literature in society? What, if anything, would he find to value in today's economic and aesthetic discourses? Ezra Pound in the Present collects new essays by prominent scholars of modernist poetics to engage the relevance of Pound's work for our times, testing whether his literature was, as he hoped it would be, “news that stays news.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501307720
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/06/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	17 MB
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About the Author

Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (2008).

Paul Stasi is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Albany, USA. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (2012) and the co-editor, with Jennifer Greiman, of The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury, 2013). His work has appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Comparative Literature, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Twentieth Century Literature and La Habana Elegante.
Paul Stasi is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, USA. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (2012), as well as essays on T.S. Eliot, Richard Flannagan, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Jean Toomer.
Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (2008).

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

I. Pound's Methods
1. Why Pound's Imagist Poems Still Matter
Charles Altieri (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
2. Not-So-Distant Reading
Josephine Park (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
3. Paleolithic Media: Deep Time and Ezra Pound's Methods
Aaron Jaffe (University of Louisville, USA)

II. Pound's Worlds
4. “I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound's Japan
Christopher Bush (Northwestern University, USA)
5. Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature
Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
6. Ezra Pound and the Comparative Literature of the Present, or, Triptych Rome/London/Pisa
Christine Froula (Northwestern University, USA)

II. Pound's Value
7. Ezra Pound and the Critique of Value
Paul Stasi (University at Albany, USA)
8. Ezra Pound's Effective Demand: Keynes, Causality, and The Cantos
C.D. Blanton (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

'An enclosure for stray animals, ' Pound quipped of his name. Eight cutting-edge readers of his work have been here editorially gathered into discussion, less to define an enclosure than to open out onto a series of contemporary critical fields that situate Pound where he has always belonged-amid the changing reaches of the present, bringing news, good or bad, that stays news.
Richard Sieburth, Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA, and editor of New Selected Poems and Translations by Ezra Pound

This is a book we have been waiting for a long time: a volume exploring Ezra Pound's significance for our life now. These illuminating essays are pioneer work: they offer critiques of Pound's poetry and criticism in the contexts of globalization, digital culture, East Asia, and capitalism, giving scholars unexpected opportunities of evaluating contemporary theories of reading, university disciplines, theories of value, and economic phenomena such as the current banking crisis. The outstanding scholars reunited in this collection have cut paths in the wilderness so that we may follow. We owe them gratitude.
Roxana Preda, Associate Lecturer in English and American Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK, and Chair of the Ezra Pound Society

This provocative collection includes essays by both established and emerging scholars who engage what one of the contributors, Christoper Bush, calls "the proximity of what is admirable and what is execrable in [Pound's] work." Many of Pound's concerns-finance capitalism, the US's Founding Fathers, what is meant by "world" literature, the US and East Asia-are also present concerns, and Pound's particular blindness and insights regarding those concerns may illuminate today's readers. Different readers will value different essays in this volume. For this reviewer, the strongest contributions are Charles Altieri's on Pound's imagist poems and the "epiphanic model" of much contemporary poetry; Bush's on Japan's "mediation" of China for Pound; Christine Froula's on the "triptych" of the Pisan Cantos, Sextus Propertius, and Mauberley; and C. D. Blanton's on J. D. Keynes, Major Douglas, and the Fifth Decade of Cantos ... This collection of essays will help readers think about Pound's work in fresh ways. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
CHOICE

From the Publisher