Ezra Pound in the Present Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity

by Stasi, Paul; Park, Josephine

• ISBN13: 9781501307713
• ISBN10: 1501307711
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-10-06
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

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.”

Author Biography

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.

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