Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem

An exploration of the role of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry.

Robert Kern (Author)

9780521105552, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 March 2009

336 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

"...a valuable contribution to modernist scholarship." Paideuma

This is a critical and historical interpretation of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's 'discovery' of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the 'language of nature'. This language of nature is here shown to be a mythic conception continuous with the Renaissance idea of the language of Adam - a language lacking any difference between what it is and what it means. Through analysing and contextualising the nineteenth-century works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Fenollosa and the twentieth-century creations of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.

1. Introduction: the European hallucination
2. Emerson and the language of nature
3. Character assassination: representing Chinese in nineteenth-century linguistics
4. Otto Jesperson and Chinese as the future of language
5. Language in its primary use: Fenollosa and the Chinese character
Interchapter: Pound, Emerson, and the poetics of creative reading
6. Modernising Orientalism/Orientalising modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese translation, and English-as-Chinese
7. Seeing the world without language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American speech.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]