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

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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 Pounds work for our times, testing whether his literature was, as he hoped it would be, news that stays news.

Reviews

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 concernsfinance capitalism, the US's Founding Fathers, what is meant by "world" literature, the US and East Asiaare 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 *
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 belongedamid 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 Pounds significance for our life now. These illuminating essays are pioneer work: they offer critiques of Pounds 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 *
Pound studies often repeat the command to 'Make it new!' as a kind of catechism, but this collection actually does it. Avoiding mechanical repetitions of over-familiar truisms, these essays set in motion Pounds conviction that 'we do not know the past in chronological sequence... what we know we know by ripples and spiral eddying out from us and our time.' Park, Stasi, and their contributors honor Pound by reimagining him for the 21st century. * Michael Coyle, Professor of English, Colgate University, USA *
[The book] is a crucial and timely intervention in Pound Studies, assessing as well as galvanising a new phase of innovative work in the field. * Make It New (The Ezra Pound Society) *

Author Bio

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.