James Dowthwaite – författare

Ezra Pound is one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century, a writer whose poetry is particularly notable for the intensity of its linguistic qualities. Indeed, from the principles of Imagism to the polyphony of his Cantos, Pound is central to our conception of modernism’s relationship with language. This volume explores the development of Pound’s understanding of language in the context of twentieth-century linguistics and the philosophy of language. It draws on largely unpublished archival material in order to provide a broadly chronological account of the development of Pound’s views and their relation to both his own poetry and to modernist writing as a whole. Beginning with Pound’s contentious relationship with philology and his antagonism towards academia, the book traces continuities and shifts across Pound’s career, culminating in a discussion of the centrality of language to the conception of his Cantos. While it contains discussions around significant figures in twentieth-century linguistic thought, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the book attempts to recover the work of theorists such as Leonard Bloomfield, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and C.K. Ogden, figures who were once central to modernism, but who have largely been pushed to the periphery of modernist studies. The picture of Pound that emerges is a figure whose understanding of language is not only bound up with modernist approaches to anthropology, politics, and philosophy, but which calls for a new understanding of modernism’s relationship to each.

Ezra Pound is one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century, a writer whose poetry is particularly notable for the intensity of its linguistic qualities. Indeed, from the principles of Imagism to the polyphony of his Cantos, Pound is central to our conception of modernism’s relationship with language. This volume explores the development of Pound’s understanding of language in the context of twentieth-century linguistics and the philosophy of language. It draws on largely unpublished archival material in order to provide a broadly chronological account of the development of Pound’s views and their relation to both his own poetry and to modernist writing as a whole. Beginning with Pound’s contentious relationship with philology and his antagonism towards academia, the book traces continuities and shifts across Pound’s career, culminating in a discussion of the centrality of language to the conception of his Cantos. While it contains discussions around significant figures in twentieth-century linguistic thought, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the book attempts to recover the work of theorists such as Leonard Bloomfield, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and C.K. Ogden, figures who were once central to modernism, but who have largely been pushed to the periphery of modernist studies. The picture of Pound that emerges is a figure whose understanding of language is not only bound up with modernist approaches to anthropology, politics, and philosophy, but which calls for a new understanding of modernism’s relationship to each.

Aesthetic criticism has suffered a poor reputation over the last 120 years. Often dismissing it in the form of caricature, a wave of the hand at ‘mere aestheticism’ with its apparent dogma of ‘art for art’s sake’, we rarely take it seriously as an approach to the arts today, and lose sight of its importance in its own time. This book, however, offers an account of aesthetic criticism as a far more rigorous approach to art, literature, and philosophy than is often thought. By considering the principles of aesthetic criticism on their own terms, this book provides a revised understanding of what the approach was, and what it might offer us today. In four chapters, it provides an account of the main areas of concern of aesthetic criticism: the appreciation of form and sensuality, the negotiation between artworks and their contexts, the question of artistic value, and the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and metaphysics. These are some of the central concerns in all forms of criticism, and by returning to the critical work of Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Symons – to name some examples – we can find crucial tools with which to approach them.