Ezra Pound in the Present

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.

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.

• List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments List of AbbreviationsI. Pound’s Methods1. 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 MethodsAaron Jaffe (University of Louisville, USA)II. Pound's Worlds4. “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 Value7. Ezra Pound and the Critique of ValuePaul Stasi (University at Albany, USA)8. Ezra Pound’s Effective Demand: Keynes, Causality, and The CantosC.D. Blanton (University of California, Berkeley, USA)BibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex