- Department of English
Woolley Building A20
University of Sydney NSW 2006
Australia - +612-9351-2276
Mark Byron
The University of Sydney, English, Faculty Member
- English Literature, Literary Theory, Digital Humanities, Textual Scholarship, Literary Criticism, Textual Criticism, and 172 morePhenomenology, Eriugena, Modern Drama, Paragone, American Literature, Text Encoding, History of Literature as a Discipline, Samuel Beckett, Modern Manuscript Studies, Hermeneutics, Ezra Pound, Modernism, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Modernist poetry, Modernism (Literature), Poetry, Byzantine Studies, Byzantine History, Byzantine Philosophy, Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Late Antique and Byzantine History, Neoplatonism and late antique philosophy, Neoplatonism, Carolingian Studies, Islamic and Norman Sicily, Medieval Sicily, Ravenna, Byzantine Mosaics, Early Christianity, Early Christian Mosaics, Gerald Murnane, Archaeology of the Eurasian steppe belt, Early Medieval Archaeology, Islamic Philosophy, Medieval Islamic History, Tang Dynasty, Chinese poetry, Song Dynasty, Chinese Art - Calligraphy & Ink Painting, Buddhist Studies, Buddhist Philosophy, Chan/Zen Buddhism, Buddhist Sculpture, Gertrude Stein, J. M. Coetzee, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Studies, Early Middle Ages (History), Archaeology Of The Migration Period And The Early Middle Ages, Barbarians and Romans in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, Barbarians, History of Eurasian Steppe, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Martianus Capella, Norman Sicily, Islamic Sicily, Al-Andalus, Al Andalus (Islamic History), Avicenna, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Averroes, Alfarabi, Transnationalism, Global Modernism, Word and Image Studies, Twentieth Century American Poetry, Irish Literature, Irish Drama, Modern Irish Language and Literature, William Butler Yeats, Mina Loy, Poetics, Narratology, Aesthetics, Historical Poetics, Medieval Archaeology, Troubadour Studies, Historical Theology, Medieval Church History, Chinese history (History), Chinese art history, Buddhist art and architecture, Byzantine art, Byzantine Archaeology, Byzantine Architecture, Vorticism, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Wyndham Lewis, Archives, History of Universities, Intellectual History, Medieval Studies, Medieval History, History of the Book, Dino Buzzati, Italian Literature, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Dolce stil novo, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante and the ancient commentaries tradition, Dante Studies, Encyclopedism, Medieval History and Archaeology of the Steppe, Central Asia, Central Asia (History), Mongolian and Central Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies, Archaeology of Central Asia, Central Asian Archaeology, History of Central Asia, Islam in Central Asia, Central Asian History (Area Studies), Central Asian Buddhism, Central Asian Societies, Medieval Central Asia and Iran, Silk Road Studies, Archaeology of the Silk Road, Silk Road, Silk Road Archaeology, Mongolian Studies, History of the Mongol Empire, Mongol world empire Seljuk, Marianne Moore, Modern Italian Poetry, Film Studies, Australian film, Indigenous Film, Italian cinema (Film Studies), German Expressionism, German Expressionist Film, German Romanticism, Prosody, Metrics and Prosody, Latin poetry, Greek Lyric Poetry, Troubadour and Trouvère Song, Sicily, Byzantine history and archaeology, Byzantine historiography, Byzantium, Byzantine monasticism, Byzantine Literature, Gregory of Nazianzus, Philology, Classical philology, Romance philology, Etymology, Indo-European Etymology, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romanticism, Romantic English poetry, English Romanticism, German romanticism and idealism, Schleiermacher, Archaeology, History of Archaeological Theory, Material Culture Studies, Archival Studies, Digital Archives, Thing Theory, Ontology, Anthropocene, Anthropocene studies, Normans in Southern Italy, Kingdom of Sicily (1130-1300), Arabic of Sicily, and Medieval Southern Italy and Sicilyedit
- I am Professor of Modern Literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, where I teach modern an... moreI am Professor of Modern Literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney, where I teach modern and contemporary British, Irish and American literature, as well as drama and textual studies. I have taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at Cambridge University, where I completed my PhD in 2001. I am finishing the digital manuscript edition of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, as part of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), directed from the Centre for Textual Genetics at the University of Antwerp and the Samuel Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. I am currently an ARC Future Fellow (2017-2020) with the project Modernism and the Early Middle Ages. My monographs include Ezra Pound's Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Samuel Beckett’s Geological Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2020). I also co-edited a dossier with Stefano Rosignoli on Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal of Beckett Studies 25.1 (2016). I edited Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill with Sophia Barnes (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), as well as the essay collection The New Ezra Pound Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019). I am President of the Ezra Pound Society.edit
Samuel Beckett’s Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett’s prose, drama, and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett’s... more
Samuel Beckett’s Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett’s prose, drama, and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett’s texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self- awareness, Beckett’s late prose narratives – Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho – comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett’s own oeuvre.
Research Interests: Etymology, Posthumanism, Narratology, Samuel Beckett, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), and 12 moreNeolithic Archaeology, Modernism, Object Oriented Ontology, Literary History, Historiographic Metafiction, Samuel Beckett (Literature), Biographic Metafiction, Deep time, Indo-European Etymology, Classical archaeology and literature, Literature and Geology, and Modern Irish and British Fiction
This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to newly available primary sources and recent methodological developments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the state of Pound's texts, both... more
This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to newly available primary sources and recent methodological developments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the state of Pound's texts, both those upon which he relied for source material and those he produced in manuscript and print. Part II provides a comprehensive overview of the relation between Pound's poetry and translations and scholarship in East Asian Studies. Part III examines the radical reconception of Pound's cultural and political activities throughout his career, and his continuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent controversial scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural theory. Pound's wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests are given new analytic treatment, with an emphasis on how recent developments in gender and sexuality studies, medieval historiography, textual genetics, sound studies, visual cultures, and other fields can develop an understanding of Pound's poetry and prose.
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This critical manuscript edition makes available for the first time Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s unfinished and unpublished detective novel, The Blue Spill. Composed in the Italian winter of 1930, the novel is a playfully self-conscious... more
This critical manuscript edition makes available for the first time Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s unfinished and unpublished detective novel, The Blue Spill. Composed in the Italian winter of 1930, the novel is a playfully self-conscious exploration of the detective genre during its Golden Age of the 1920s and 30s. The novel parodies the English genre centred upon Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and Dorothy Sayers’ interwar detective Lord Wimsey. Pound and Rudge composed this novel just as the publisher Mondadori began publishing in the enormously popular Italian gialli genre (1929-41): these detective novels were known for their striking yellow (giallo) covers, and comprised Italian translations of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others, and went on to publish emergent Italian detective fiction writers such as Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri. This study offers a revealing insight into the creative collaboration between two major figures in Modernist poetry and music, exploring the novel’s signficance as a middlebrow literary project. At the time Pound was occupied with the production of his epic poem The Cantos, and Rudge was increasingly involved in the Fondazione Musica Chigiana in Siena. Their collaboration in a multi-year series of classical music performances in Rapallo provided the material opportunity to explore new aesthetic directions, given expression in this witty and self-conscious literary experiment that can be seen as a parodic and critical rejoinder to the burgeoning genre of detective fiction. The edited text of the novel – two overlapping, incomplete manuscript drafts – is provided with a critical apparatus, noting the influences and range of references salted into the fabric of the narrative as well as the structure of its collaborative composition. The edition also contains a series of essays providing historical and critical context for the novel, and a study of its place in the extensive Pound-Rudge collaboration in the 1920s and 30s.
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Ezra Pound's sustained use of ancient and medieval philosophical sources, particularly those within the Neoplatonic tradition, is well known. Yet the specific influence of the ninth-century theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena on Pound's... more
Ezra Pound's sustained use of ancient and medieval philosophical sources, particularly those within the Neoplatonic tradition, is well known. Yet the specific influence of the ninth-century theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena on Pound's poetry and prose has received limited scholarly attention. Pound developed detailed plans to publish a commentary on Eriugena alongside his translations of two of the books of Confucianism, plans that ultimately went unrealised. Drawing on unpublished notes, drafts and manuscripts amongst the Ezra Pound papers held at Yale University, this book investigates the pivotal role of Eriugena in Pound's thought and, perhaps surprisingly, in his deployment of non-Western philosophical traditions.
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This collection of essays – the first volume in the Dialogue series – brings together new and experienced scholars to present innovative critical approaches to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. These essays broach a broad range of topics,... more
This collection of essays – the first volume in the Dialogue series – brings together new and experienced scholars to present innovative critical approaches to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame. These essays broach a broad range of topics, many of which are inherently controversial and have generated significant levels of debate in the past. Critical readings of the play in relation to music, metaphysics, intertextuality, and time are counterpointed by essays that consider the nature of performance, the history of the theater and the music hall, Beckett’s attitudes to directing his play, and his responses to other directors. This collection will be of special interest to Beckett scholars, to students of literature and drama, and to drama theorists and practitioners.
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Gerald Murnane is the pre-eminent chronicler of Irish-Australian Catholic male youth: its spiritual curiosity, onanistic fantasies and inevitable guilt, and the irresistible attraction to the arcane and the ceremonial. His early novels... more
Gerald Murnane is the pre-eminent chronicler of Irish-Australian Catholic male youth: its spiritual curiosity, onanistic fantasies and inevitable guilt, and the irresistible attraction to the arcane and the ceremonial. His early novels chart the inner lives of adolescent protagonists – Clement Killeaton in Tamarisk Row (1974) and Adrian Sherd in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976) – chronicling their agonistic struggles with Catholicism and self-abuse, set in the drought-stricken plains of rural Victoria. The specifically Irish-Catholic content turns on Murnane’s deliberate approximations between narrative and autobiography, sufficiently non-identical to bear plausible deniability and which lend the narration a sardonic and amused tone. His later novel Inland (1988) also has its protagonist meditating copiously on his Irish Catholic upbringing and its effects on his understanding of faith, his capacity to enter into romantic relationships, and his sense of the world. The narrative is channelled through a geography of the grasslands of Melbourne County, refracted by meditations on the Hungarian Alföld (an exclave of the great Eurasian steppe) and the South Dakotan prairie. This displacement of Irish-Australia by way of Hungary and North America comprises a deft method by which to examine masculine Australian Irish Catholicity out in plain sight, where geomorphology, ecology, and matters of national identity illuminate the meridians of the Irish-Australian Catholic diaspora.
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What is allegory? What can it tell us? What kinds of intellectual and tropological structures inform the production and reception of allegory? Is it generalizable, or is it specific to particular cultural formations? The vast project of... more
What is allegory? What can it tell us? What kinds of intellectual and tropological structures inform the production and reception of allegory? Is it generalizable, or is it specific to particular cultural formations? The vast project of Fredric Jameson's Allegory and Ideology locates these questions in the long history of allegorical analysis, identifying the structures that undergird much of the Western tropological imaginary and that provide ways of modulating individual identity with collective action and belief: namely, ideology. Yet Jameson's critique of allegory goes beyond this relation, showing how more complex forms of allegory extend into allegoresis, whereby the gaps and slippages in the structure of allegory afford libidinal energies that in turn subject allegory to its own critical apparatus.
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Beckett's late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the... more
Beckett's late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the dimensionality and mobility of character. In their negotiations with literary history and etymology these texts replenish the stocks of language across the deep time of its evolution and its accrual of semantic and associative richness. In their rich geological and archaeological dispositions, the three texts of Nohow On demonstrate how deep time intersects with the narrative present in images of the earth, providing a locus for life and afterlife: both in the sense of the posthumous condition and in offering belated aesthetic possibilities.
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Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the exegetical... more
Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts (principally from the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Islamic traditions) as well as the philological strategies applied to classical works such as the Homeric epics in the Graeco-Roman tradition, or the Chinese 詩經 (Shijing) or Classic of Poetry. Cognate traditions of exegesis and commentary formed around Roman Law and Canon Law of the Christian Church, and also finds expression in the long tradition of Chinese historical commentaries and exegeses on the Five Classics and Four Books. As these practices developed in the West, they were adapted to medieval and early modern literary texts from which the early manifestations of modern secular literary analysis came into being in European and American universities. Close reading comprises the methodologies at the centre of literary scholarship as it developed in the modern academy over the past century or so, and has come to define a central set of practices that dominated scholarly work in English departments until the turn to literary and critical theory in the late-nineteen-sixties. This essay provides an overview of these dominant forms of close reading in the modern Western academy. The focus rests upon close reading practices and their codification in university English departments, although reference is made to non-Western reading practices and philological traditions, as well as to significant non-Anglophone alternatives to the common understanding of literary close reading.
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Textual Studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that: evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually; document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated; and propose ways in which they might be... more
Textual Studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that: evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually; document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated; and propose ways in which they might be edited to minimize error and maximize the text’s integrity. The vast temporal reach of the history of textuality – from oral traditions spanning thousands of years, and written forms dating from the fourth millenium BCE, to printed and digital text forms – is matched by its geographical range covering every linguistic community around the globe. The practice of giving close attention to material text-bearing documents and the reliability of their written or printed content stems from antiquity, paying closest attention to sacred texts as well as to legal documents and literary works that helped form linguistic and social group identity. With the incarnation of the printing press in the early-modern West, the rapid reproduction of text matter in large quantities had the effect of corrupting many texts with printing errors, as well as providing the technical means of correcting such errors more cheaply and quickly than in the preceding scribal culture.
From the eighteenth century techniques of textual criticism were developed to attempt systematic correction of textual error, again with an emphasis on scriptural and classical texts. This ‘golden age of philology’ slowly widened its range to consider such foundational medieval texts as Dante’s Commedia, as well as, in time, modern vernacular literature. The technique of stemmatic analysis – the establishment of family relationships between existing documents of a text – provided the means for scholars to choose between copies of a work in the pursuit of accuracy. In the absence of original documents (manuscripts in the hand of Aristotle or the four Evangelists, for example) the choice between existing versions of a text were often made eclectically – that is, drawing on multiple versions – and thus were subject to such considerations as the historic range and geographical diffusion of documents, the systematic identification of common scribal errors, and matters of translation.
As the study of modern languages and literatures consolidated into modern university departments in the later nineteenth century, new techniques emerged with the aim of providing reliable literary texts free from obvious error. This aim had in common with the preceding philological tradition the belief that what a text means – discovered in the practice of hermeneutics – was contingent on what the text states – established by an accurate textual record that eliminates error by means of textual criticism. The methods of textual criticism took several paths through the twentieth century: the Anglophone tradition centred on editing Shakespeare’s works by drawing on the earliest available documents – the printed Quartos and Folios – developing into the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle copy-text ‘tradition’ which was then deployed as a method by which to edit later texts. The status of variants in modern literary works with multiple authorial manuscripts – not to mention the existence of competing versions of several of Shakespeare’s plays – complicated matters sufficiently that editors looked to alternate editorial models. Genetic editorial methods draw in part on German editorial techniques, collating all existing manuscripts and printed texts of a work in order to provide a record of its composition process, including epigenetic processes following publication. The French methods of critique génétique also place the documentary record at the centre, where the dossier is given priority over any one printed edition, and poststructuralist theory is used to examine the process of ‘textual invention.’ The inherently social aspects of textual production – the author’s interaction with agents, censors, publishers, printers, and the way these interactions shape the content and presentation of the text – has reconceived how textual authority and variation are understood in the social and economic contexts of publication. And finally the advent of digital publication platforms has given rise to new developments in the presentation of textual editions and manuscript documents, displacing copy-text editing in some fields such as Modernism Studies in favour of genetic or synoptic models of composition and textual production.
From the eighteenth century techniques of textual criticism were developed to attempt systematic correction of textual error, again with an emphasis on scriptural and classical texts. This ‘golden age of philology’ slowly widened its range to consider such foundational medieval texts as Dante’s Commedia, as well as, in time, modern vernacular literature. The technique of stemmatic analysis – the establishment of family relationships between existing documents of a text – provided the means for scholars to choose between copies of a work in the pursuit of accuracy. In the absence of original documents (manuscripts in the hand of Aristotle or the four Evangelists, for example) the choice between existing versions of a text were often made eclectically – that is, drawing on multiple versions – and thus were subject to such considerations as the historic range and geographical diffusion of documents, the systematic identification of common scribal errors, and matters of translation.
As the study of modern languages and literatures consolidated into modern university departments in the later nineteenth century, new techniques emerged with the aim of providing reliable literary texts free from obvious error. This aim had in common with the preceding philological tradition the belief that what a text means – discovered in the practice of hermeneutics – was contingent on what the text states – established by an accurate textual record that eliminates error by means of textual criticism. The methods of textual criticism took several paths through the twentieth century: the Anglophone tradition centred on editing Shakespeare’s works by drawing on the earliest available documents – the printed Quartos and Folios – developing into the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle copy-text ‘tradition’ which was then deployed as a method by which to edit later texts. The status of variants in modern literary works with multiple authorial manuscripts – not to mention the existence of competing versions of several of Shakespeare’s plays – complicated matters sufficiently that editors looked to alternate editorial models. Genetic editorial methods draw in part on German editorial techniques, collating all existing manuscripts and printed texts of a work in order to provide a record of its composition process, including epigenetic processes following publication. The French methods of critique génétique also place the documentary record at the centre, where the dossier is given priority over any one printed edition, and poststructuralist theory is used to examine the process of ‘textual invention.’ The inherently social aspects of textual production – the author’s interaction with agents, censors, publishers, printers, and the way these interactions shape the content and presentation of the text – has reconceived how textual authority and variation are understood in the social and economic contexts of publication. And finally the advent of digital publication platforms has given rise to new developments in the presentation of textual editions and manuscript documents, displacing copy-text editing in some fields such as Modernism Studies in favour of genetic or synoptic models of composition and textual production.
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In the long sustained interest American poets have held for Chinese aesthetics and literature, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder are the most prominent exponents of this practice, and each has produced exemplary modes of navigating the path... more
In the long sustained interest American poets have held for Chinese aesthetics and literature, Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder are the most prominent exponents of this practice, and each has produced exemplary modes of navigating the path between East and West. This essay takes two examples from each poet to illustrate how Pound set much of the agenda for East-West aesthetics during and after the twentieth century, and how Snyder seeks to critically evaluate the tradition in which he performs as a way to further an understanding of Chinese aesthetics. Each poet composed a series of translations of Tang Dynasty poetry early in their careers: for Pound, most of Cathay (1915) was comprised of ‘translations’ of the poetry of Li Bai, adapted from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa and his Japanese tutors; and Snyder’s translations of the highly unorthodox Tang poet Han Shan gave him a critical perspective from which to consider canonicity and poetic practice. Later in their careers, both Pound and Snyder produced ekphrastic poems on Chinese painting: Pound’s Canto XLIX or the ‘Seven Lakes’ canto mediates Chinese painting by way of a Japanese album of painting and calligraphy, while Snyder’s direct apprehension of a Song Dynasty landscape scroll painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art provides him with a means by which to respond to the specific techniques evident in the artwork, and to the centuries of calligraphy, seal stamps of ownership, and other historical records attached to the silk painting. Both poets engage in a version of historical poetics – an awareness of the historical (and cultural) specificity of the objects they take for poetic material, as well as an acute apprehension of their own historically mediated poetic activities, not only in terms of the history of Anglophone poetics, but also, in Snyder’s case, in his response to the challenge presented by Modernist poetic practice to absorb and understand the Chinese artistic and poetic traditions deemed of such value to poets.
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Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah is an astonishing achievement in Australian Indigenous cinema, and in a global context, Fourth Cinema. Combining the realism of violence and dispossession within Central Desert Indigenous... more
Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah is an astonishing achievement in Australian Indigenous cinema, and in a global context, Fourth Cinema. Combining the realism of violence and dispossession within Central Desert Indigenous communities, particularly violence against women and minors, with sharp ground–level cinematography and extensive use of silence, the film builds on a recent wave of experimental Indigenous film–making to refract narratives of Indigenous experience in striking ways. That it performs such an acute critique of cultural marginalization and of its representation in film culture by means of expert filmic technique is distinction enough. That it accomplishes such a nuanced and intelligent response to a history of dispossession and of marginal cultural representation with two first–time screen actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, is astonishing. Their subtle performances – McNamara’s character makes only one utterance, his name, during the entire film – become magnetic embodiments of their narrative predicament. They situate the viewer as witness to violence and prejudice, and as an inheritor of a history of physical and spiritual violence. Rather than dwell in didacticism, the film instead liberates its characters by virtue of their resilience, having survived their trials. In placing two teenage Indigenous subjects at the heart of a feature film, Samson and Delilah is a decisive act of revelation, a gesture towards other stories yet untold.
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Arriving roughly halfway through Thrones, Canto CI is pivotal not only to this decad but to Pound’s entire project in The Cantos. The canto exhibits a fascination with the Na-Khi Chinese ethnic minority and its matriarchal social... more
Arriving roughly halfway through Thrones, Canto CI is pivotal not only to this decad but to Pound’s entire project in The Cantos. The canto exhibits a fascination with the Na-Khi Chinese ethnic minority and its matriarchal social structures, modulated by glancing attention to the cultural heritage of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, as well as further exploration of the Napoleonic era and the aftermath of Revolutionary ideals. Whilst there exists some excellent, if strictly non-specialist scholarly work on the role of the Na-Khi of south-western China in this and other cantos within Thrones, the wider implications for The Cantos have yet to be fully explored. Pound’s reading of Joseph Rock’s botanical and ethnographic studies of the Na-Khi opens up some fertile biographical and historical space in which to think through Pound’s latter-day internal exile at St Elizabeths. In this canto Pound engages one of his more striking strategies with regard to cultural and political commentary: he modulates an imperial centre (Napoleon) with a periphery (the Na-Khi). The added dynamism of the Mongolian Khanate itself shifts radically from periphery to centre and back again in its rise and decline within Chinese Imperial history. What is the reason for this strategy at this point in The Cantos beyond intellectual habit and long-standing meditation upon political power and its ephemeral agency?
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Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts.... more
Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson’s biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling’s edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett’s reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett’s textual habitus. I will show how Beckett’s late prose work, Worstward Ho, is a prime example of this approach to writing, examining how narrative, character, semantics, and syntax are slowly eroded by their own self-awareness (the title of this paper alludes to this process of self-erosion in the word corrasion, a geological term referring to the erosion of rock by various forms of water, ice, snow and moraine).
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Worstward Ho interrogates what it means for a text to imagine itself in the process of its own creation. Its rising and falling patterns of creation and decreation with respect to narrative, character, semantics, and syntax demonstrate a... more
Worstward Ho interrogates what it means for a text to imagine itself in the process of its own creation. Its rising and falling patterns of creation and decreation with respect to narrative, character, semantics, and syntax demonstrate a kind of immanent thinking as the text modulates between being and non-being. Worstward Ho manifests intensive creativity in its methods of allusion across and beyond Beckett's oeuvre. These literary deformations bear morphological similarities with the gyri and sulci, the ridges and grooves in the human cortex that provide the human brain with significantly enhanced neural connectivity and processing power.
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An Introduction to the special issue of Affirmations 4.1 on the topic of Transnational Modernisms, at http://affirmations.arts.unsw.edu.au/index.php?journal=aom&page=issue&op=current
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Co-authored introduction to the special dossier Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal of Beckett Studies 25.1 (2016)
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Beckett’s investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history,... more
Beckett’s investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett’s note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett’s absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett’s reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband’s History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett’s notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge’s Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett’s overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.
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Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The Cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his... more
Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The Cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his poem to perform as a repository for important ideas and their often-precarious textual transmission, his project was also aimed at the poetic representation of a paradiso terrestre, an ideal state of intellectual community at the end of history. Consequently, in a critical phase during the 1930s he was drawn to models of theological and political eschatology, not least those of the Confucian cosmos and Italian Fascism. This intensified interest was to have drastic consequences: Pound was arrested on charges of treason and subsequently detained in the US Army Detention Training Center outside of Pisa for his radio broadcasts during World War Two in Italy. During his incarceration Pound wrote much of The Pisan Cantos, in which pastoral observation is combined with political vituperation and nostalgic reminiscence. Pound also makes sustained reference to Johannes Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Hibernian-Carolingian theologian and poet who was condemned on account of disseminating heretical doctrines during his lifetime and then posthumously in the Averroist condemnations at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. Following the war and the publication of The Pisan Cantos (for which Pound was controversially awarded the inaugural Bollingen Prize), Pound’s epic turned to increasingly fragmented meditations on law, economics, political history, and cultural production. In these later cantos, the ruined dream of his paradise terrestre is glimpsed at in the world of the Na-Khi, a Chinese ethnic minority adhering to matriarchal social structures and demonstrating a deeply ecological system of knowledge. This essay will explore the ways in which these apparently disparate sources provide Pound with a means by which to imagine a paradise in his poem in the midst of its disillusion in his own life.
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Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt is justifiably known as the ‘white whale’ of Beckett Studies. Its wartime composition history in conditions of compound displacement, from the first tentative notes in 1941 to the first attempts at publication in... more
Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt is justifiably known as the ‘white whale’ of Beckett Studies. Its wartime composition history in conditions of compound displacement, from the first tentative notes in 1941 to the first attempts at publication in 1945, traces out a process of manuscript revision, recirculation, fragmentation and recombination: a process in which art and life echoed each other’s estrangements. The complicated journey into print bore its own pitfalls, where textual error combined with evidence of partial narrative excisions, serial non sequiturs, and a post-narrative midden of fragments both insinuated within and separated from the story of Watt and his master. This essay engages in a close examination of a selected range of variant types between published editions and between published text and manuscript (and partial typescript). There is no golden key, but a pattern emerges whereby an ambivalent alternation between presence and absence of textual material indicates the novel and its documents to be a kind of work-genesis. Watt’s perplexing struggle with knowing and being reflects and informs the state of the novel’s constituent materials. His tussle with the faculties of perception, as well as the improbable utterance of his strange quest, enjoins the reader to rethink the narrative and textual categories upon which a hermeneutics might be assayed. The material conditions of the novel’s composition, transmission and post-publication career are well known. But the signal correspondence between the text’s material vicissitudes, its thematic burden, and its hermeneutic challenges are positively striking. They imply a textual assemblage demanding a most supple editorial technique: the presence and absence, the ones and zeros structuring the digital scholarly edition.
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As a subset of modernist digital editions, the digital manuscript brings a number of specific issues into sharp focus: what is gained, and lost, by reading and studying a digital manuscript as opposed to codex facsimiles, or even... more
As a subset of modernist digital editions, the digital manuscript brings a number of specific issues into sharp focus: what is gained, and lost, by reading and studying a digital manuscript as opposed to codex facsimiles, or even consulting the original documents housed within the literary archive? What kind of effect does digitisation have on the perceived aura of an artwork, and artist, and our understanding of the role of authorship and authority? How do these issues intersect with recent discourses of materialist modernism, book history, curation, as well as the conceptual triangulation of work, text and document? This paper will seek to open up some of these questions, beginning with a critical examination of the digital manuscript edition-in-progress of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, and moving out into other cognate examples in digital textual scholarship and in modernist manuscript studies more generally.
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This essay explores the way Ezra Pound deployed his early medieval sources in his poetry. In particular, his attention to the material forms of the texts of John Scottus Eriugena complement the philosophical and poetic innovations Pound... more
This essay explores the way Ezra Pound deployed his early medieval sources in his poetry. In particular, his attention to the material forms of the texts of John Scottus Eriugena complement the philosophical and poetic innovations Pound valued in the ninth-century Hibernian scholar, whose most productive years were spent in the Carolingian court. Eriugena’s innovations in glosses and commentary on late-classical authors (Boethius, Martianus Capella) and Eastern patristic authors (Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius) helped usher in durable medieval text practices. Pound’s note-taking on Eriugena emulates this liberation of textual form, and is especially conducive to digital editorial treatment.
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Beckett’s various interrupted journeys in the trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable – function as a series of meditations on literary narrative, especially its modern limitations and crises. By attending to the nature... more
Beckett’s various interrupted journeys in the trilogy of novels – Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable – function as a series of meditations on literary narrative, especially its modern limitations and crises. By attending to the nature of narrative form and technique, Beckett’s careful calibration of interrupted narrative journeys and their fragile modes of articulation may be read as an extended essay on the conceptual and ethical possibilities of literary expression in an age of heightened mobility, at once marked out by technologies of travel and the brute reality of forced migration. This essay attempts a reading of Beckett’s interrupted journeys that critically evaluates the types of motion in his fiction and drama, as well as the implicit and subtle but powerful reflection upon the meaning of quests and migrations in the modern age.
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This paper revises an argument made in my paper “In a Station of the Cantos: Ezra Pound’s ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto and the Shō-Shō Hakkei Tekagami,” Literature and Aesthetics 22.2 (2012): 138-152. Here I provide a more extended close reading... more
This paper revises an argument made in my paper “In a Station of the Cantos: Ezra Pound’s ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto and the Shō-Shō Hakkei Tekagami,” Literature and Aesthetics 22.2 (2012): 138-152. Here I provide a more extended close reading of Canto XLIX to show how Pound mediates ideas of an 'Eastern' aesthetic with an American pastoral poetic tradition.
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The American poet Ezra Pound played a crucial role in establishing a deeper understanding of East Asian art and literature in the Anglophone sphere in the early twentieth century. Pound’s contribution, especially in his translation of... more
The American poet Ezra Pound played a crucial role in establishing a deeper understanding of East Asian art and literature in the Anglophone sphere in the early twentieth century. Pound’s contribution, especially in his translation of Chinese poetry, has long been recognised – T. S. Eliot wrote as early as 1928 that Pound was “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Scholars have been careful to qualify Pound’s youthful orientalism, and rightly show caution regarding his more strident claims for and uses of Chinese materials. Initially Pound followed the linguistically naive views of Ernest Fenollosa on matters of Chinese language – using Fenollosa’s notebooks as a basis for his 1915 volume Cathay and for the 1919 essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” which provided the basis for a theory of the poetic image along “ideogrammic” lines.
Over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study, Pound’s proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation / adaptation from the Chinese as early as 1915 in Cathay, but later attention to Chinese history and aesthetics in the China Cantos (first published in 1940) demonstrates a concerted effort to absorb and conceptualise a Chinese aesthetic. For Pound, this aesthetic would reside fundamentally at the juncture between word and image – the “ideogrammic method” attempted a word-image synthesis in the poetic image – shown most vividly in the “Seven Lakes” canto that immediately precedes the China Cantos in his epic poem The Cantos. This short lyric piece was inspired by, and performs a dialogue with, the Sho-Sho Hakkei tekagami in Pound’s possession. This (Japanese) illustrated album of calligraphy provides the poet with the means to pass beyond occidental traditions of ekphrasis and to imagine a transmediatic sensibility, in which word and image perform mutually constituting functions that avowedly depart (for Pound) from Western conventions of the time.
This paper explores the ways in which the “Seven Lakes” canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and assesses the context of this poem within Pound’s own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound’s mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.
Over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study, Pound’s proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation / adaptation from the Chinese as early as 1915 in Cathay, but later attention to Chinese history and aesthetics in the China Cantos (first published in 1940) demonstrates a concerted effort to absorb and conceptualise a Chinese aesthetic. For Pound, this aesthetic would reside fundamentally at the juncture between word and image – the “ideogrammic method” attempted a word-image synthesis in the poetic image – shown most vividly in the “Seven Lakes” canto that immediately precedes the China Cantos in his epic poem The Cantos. This short lyric piece was inspired by, and performs a dialogue with, the Sho-Sho Hakkei tekagami in Pound’s possession. This (Japanese) illustrated album of calligraphy provides the poet with the means to pass beyond occidental traditions of ekphrasis and to imagine a transmediatic sensibility, in which word and image perform mutually constituting functions that avowedly depart (for Pound) from Western conventions of the time.
This paper explores the ways in which the “Seven Lakes” canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and assesses the context of this poem within Pound’s own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound’s mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.
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The poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe have inspired a varied abundance of adaptations and emulations. These acts of homage range from prose narratives, poems, and graphic novels, to dramatic and operatic performances, to animation... more
The poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe have inspired a varied abundance of adaptations and emulations. These acts of homage range from prose narratives, poems, and graphic novels, to dramatic and operatic performances, to animation comedy and visual artworks. Yet at the gravitational centre of Poe adaptation is the feature film. Throughout the history of cinema filmmakers and directors have found Poe’s texts irresistible, and none more than “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). This short prose text has generated dozens of filmic adaptations of striking aesthetic and formal variety. The combination of gothic literary conventions, an emotionally suggestible narrator, and contemporary themes of moral and physical degeneracy provides ample stimulus for creative re-imagining of the fate of the house’s inhabitants. This text provokes an unrivalled cinematic experimentalism when compared with almost any other frequently adapted pre-cinematic text, such as the novels of Jane Austen. Does something inhere in the story or its mode of narration to inspire this experimental challenge to aspirant directors? This essay will attempt to show by way of close reading that Poe’s text is a literary phantasmagoria, a lantern show that invites a specifically cinematic speculation as to the nature of events, the mode of their narration, and the qualities of perception enlisted within the narrative frame that convey scene and action to the reader. The House of Usher – a reticulated system of story, building and family line –projects its oblique images, inciting its viewers to take on the powers of suggestion and to reanimate its bloody chamber in evermore suggestible moving images.
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Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is uniquely positioned in his oeuvre: composed in exile in 1941-45 and first published in 1953, it forecasts the transition from English to French as his preferred language of composition, and signifies a shift... more
Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is uniquely positioned in his oeuvre: composed in exile in 1941-45 and first published in 1953, it forecasts the transition from English to French as his preferred language of composition, and signifies a shift from the expansive comic mode of the early Beckett so influenced by Joyce to the linguistically austere and ontologically-minded later Beckett. The precarious mode of the text’s composition also sees a profound meditation on the purpose and structure of literary expression, abundantly evident in the six manuscript notebooks and partial typescript. This work engages with a profound rethinking of narrative, discarding any sense of compositional telos from drafts to finished, published work. Instead, a reticulated, imbricated series of narrative episodes trace paths across the surface of the published text, and deep into the archive. By force of circumstance and by force of will, Beckett thought his compositional practices into a radical zone of narrative deformation that was to have a lasting effect on his writing, and upon literary aesthetics in the latter half of the twentieth century.
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Modernist literary texts, especially those in the avant-garde tradition, present fundamental challenges to classical concepts of text status and structure. These texts, experimental in their published forms, also demonstrate complex... more
Modernist literary texts, especially those in the avant-garde tradition, present fundamental challenges to classical concepts of text status and structure. These texts, experimental in their published forms, also demonstrate complex relationships with their manuscript documents. Renewed interest in the flexible text models of the German philological tradition, and the promise of digital tools and techniques, presents scholarly editors with potentially ground-breaking opportunities to represent Modernist texts in ways that make explicit the nature and extent of their formal experimentation. This essay takes Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, and its complex manuscript archive, as an example: a number of digital tools and techniques, taken with renewed concepts of literary structure, may provide the editorial means by which to do justice to the formal and aesthetic innovations in this singular text process.
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Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous... more
Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning-up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound’s cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text’s literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound’s text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound’s text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound’s text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound’s epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.
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A commissioned essay for the how2 special issue After Stein, edited by Kate Fagan (2004) at http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_2_2004/current/stein/byron.htm
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Although begun early in 1941, and substantially drafted by 1945, Beckett’s last long novel in English was not published until 1953. That is, Watt did not see the light of day until after the première of Waiting for Godot in Paris and... more
Although begun early in 1941, and substantially drafted by 1945, Beckett’s last long novel in English was not published until 1953. That is, Watt did not see the light of day until after the première of Waiting for Godot in Paris and after each of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable had been published by Editions de Minuit. The story of the composition and transmission into print is one of perseverance, frustration, and resignation. Indeed, all extant printings of the novel are replete with inconsistencies and discordances, and conceal an imbricated relationship with the novel’s archive.
Yet the complex textual history of Watt can provide a way to reconfigure ideas concerning Beckett’s aesthetic development and the unfolding of his oeuvre. The composition and transmission of Watt was an ecstatic process (ecstasis means, literally, to stand beside oneself) – it proceeded alongside the emergence of other significant work and can be seen to complicate notions of literary influence, genealogy, and the literary object. Given that Watt presents some unique problems of physical and conceptual integrity for editorial method, it may provide an opportunity to review the status of the literary work at the time Beckett was producing his famous challenges to the novel and to dramatic form.
Yet the complex textual history of Watt can provide a way to reconfigure ideas concerning Beckett’s aesthetic development and the unfolding of his oeuvre. The composition and transmission of Watt was an ecstatic process (ecstasis means, literally, to stand beside oneself) – it proceeded alongside the emergence of other significant work and can be seen to complicate notions of literary influence, genealogy, and the literary object. Given that Watt presents some unique problems of physical and conceptual integrity for editorial method, it may provide an opportunity to review the status of the literary work at the time Beckett was producing his famous challenges to the novel and to dramatic form.
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Literature and Aesthetics 12 (2002): 83-91
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This essay explores the role of technology and textuality in the thought of Martin Heidegger and Samuel Beckett's prose fiction, 'The Lost Ones.' I draw on recent philosophy of technology as well as scholarship on medieval textual forms... more
This essay explores the role of technology and textuality in the thought of Martin Heidegger and Samuel Beckett's prose fiction, 'The Lost Ones.' I draw on recent philosophy of technology as well as scholarship on medieval textual forms and tropes.
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Ezra Pound produced an enormous amount of printed, broadcast, and performed material over a long and varied career. His archive, centered in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, contains vast holdings of publication drafts and... more
Ezra Pound produced an enormous amount of printed, broadcast, and performed material over a long and varied career. His archive, centered in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, contains vast holdings of publication drafts and unpublished material. From the recovery of hundreds of radio speeches, propaganda items, and FBI dossiers, to draft novels, musical scores, abandoned canto drafts and essays in English and Italian, the work of scholars in recent years has brought into focus a much fuller picture of his troubled historical placement. New projects on Pound’s poetic notebooks and other under-studied sources promise to enrich the understanding of his composition processes. This essay provides an overview of this scholarly enterprise, paying special attention to cases where the archive has fundamentally overturned the received view of Pound, even in the face of biographies and critical works that seek continuity in Pound’s profile and the reception of his work.
Research Interests: Archival Studies, Neoplatonism and late antique philosophy, Modernist poetry, Poetics, Archives, and 13 moreModernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Ezra Pound, Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Poetry, Arabic Philosophy, Carolingian Studies, Modernism, Neoplatonism, Modernist Literature, Christian Neoplatonism, Poetry and Poetics, Medieval Arabic Philosophy, Modern Literary Manuscripts, and Quellenforschung
Dante, and particularly the Commedia, best represents the ubiquity of Italy in Beckett's oeuvre, providing an intellectual scaffolding and a suite of structuring images in texts ranging from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Worstward... more
Dante, and particularly the Commedia, best represents the ubiquity of Italy in Beckett's oeuvre, providing an intellectual scaffolding and a suite of structuring images in texts ranging from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Worstward Ho. Italian words and literary allusions also arise at significant points in Beckett's texts, such as 'lick chops and basta' at the end of Ill
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Warfare is the event that drew poetry from its georgic home: in the West turning the ploughshares of Hesiod to the iron weaponry set against the Trojan walls of Homer; and in the East displacing the folk poetry of the Shang Dynasty with... more
Warfare is the event that drew poetry from its georgic home: in the West turning the ploughshares of Hesiod to the iron weaponry set against the Trojan walls of Homer; and in the East displacing the folk poetry of the Shang Dynasty with the martial poetry of the Zhou. The striking of metal produces a rhythmic noise common to both industries, making both agriculture and warfare companionable to poetic rhythms of different kinds. As the Homeric epics suggest, the deep implication of poetry and warfare is embedded in oral tradition. The hereditary caste of bardic poets in ancient and medieval Ireland performed their genealogical and historical repertoires recounting the heroic military feats of chieftain kings (the Proto-Indo-European compound gʷrH-dʰh₁-o-s from which the Proto-Celtic bardos stems translates as 'praisemaker'). The thematic ubiquity of warfare in poetry is in evidence in many of the world's most important cultural documents, including Enheduanna's Old Sumerian Hymn to Innana of the twenty-third century bce, the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (महाभारतम्) composed between the third century bce and the third century ce, the tenth-century Persian epic Shahnameh ,همانهاش( The Book of Kings), its near contemporary the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon, and the oral poetry of Mayan antiquity gathered in the pre-modern portions of the Songs of Dzitbalche. The competition and alternation between martial and bucolic matters across the history of poetry prompt consideration of prosodic technique: how does the poetry of warfare represent its subject matter within its form? Is there an identifiable poetics of warfare? This essay traces out a preliminary response to these questions by critically examining a range of poetic forms, spanning a historical range from antiquity to the present day, that manifest the matter of war in their prosodic techniques. While making no claims for their ubiquity, the sounds of war reverberate through the global history of poetics sufficiently to suggest that the beat of drums and the clash of metal are sound patterns basic to the performed rhythms of poetic song and speech.
Research Interests: Art History, Poetry, Modernist poetry, Soundscape Studies, Sound studies, and 11 moreTypography, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Modern Poetry, Modernism, Literature of the American Civil War, War and Literature, Walt Whitman, Atomic Bomb Literature, Hibakusha, First World War Literature, and Italian Futurism
The current age of ecological crisis presents a fundamental challenge to the human imagination: how might a novelist capture a sense of this crisis and convey it to a reader, when the scale of the crisis exceeds the limits of vision? Can... more
The current age of ecological crisis presents a fundamental challenge to the human imagination: how might a novelist capture a sense of this crisis and convey it to a reader, when the scale of the crisis exceeds the limits of vision? Can the singular conscience apprehend global crises by mediating the embodied self within an ecology of things, of species and individuals? How does one write of––or conceive of––processes of extinctions that accommodates both the species and its individual members? This essay surveys the writing of extinction and its capacity to stimulate reflection on systems and events too massive to allow direct contemplation: climate change, genocide, global mass extinctions. It takes as its focus Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter (1999) in which the last member of a species thought extinct for generations––the thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger––is discovered and executed for its reproductive and genetic material. Leigh’s novel navigates planetary forces of species extinction in its attention to the singular and final member of the species, casting the reader’s attention to the shadows of other extinction events of foundational significance to human identity: foremost among them the genocide of the Indigenous population of Tasmania by invading settler communities. By mediating barely conceivable forces of historical cruelty through the body of the hunter and the last thylacine, the novel brings into sharp relief inter-human and inter-species relations, providing a basis for contemplating and reimagining the modern human relation to ecologies more widely.
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Beckett’s relation to modernist poetics is uneven, fragmented, and complicated in its historicity and genealogy: he was deeply attentive to literary and artistic history, eager to learn from the radical experiments of his elders, and... more
Beckett’s relation to modernist poetics is uneven, fragmented, and complicated in its historicity and genealogy: he was deeply attentive to literary and artistic history, eager to learn from the radical experiments of his elders, and sensitive to the aesthetic projects of his peers, turning these attributes to his own aesthetic purposes. A whole-of-career assessment of Beckett’s modernist poetics is a project vastly exceeding the bounds of a single essay. Instead, this essay considers the poems of Echo’s Bones (1935) and how they respond to and align with some of the major developments in modernist poetics. Close consideration of such poems as ‘Alba’ and ‘Dortmunder’ reveal how Beckett’s exposure to modernist poetics – especially in Paris in the late-1920s – bear upon the style, techniques, and subject matter of his poetry. ‘Alba’ deploys a poetic genre stemming from the troubadour tradition of the 11th-12th centuries, namely the adulterous lover’s song at dawn. This choice of genre complements other examples of troubadour poetics in Echo’s Bones, such as the enueg or poem of complaint, and the serena or the lover’s anticipation of evening consummation of his desire, and furthers the influence of Romance philology upon modernist poetics. Both poems also demonstrate the abiding influence of orientalist imagery, affording Beckett the opportunity to engage critically with the modernist tropes of ‘Old Cathay’ by means of irony and poetic experimentation. Beckett produces his avant-garde bona fides in these early poems, only later to turn from the ‘loutishness of learning’ he saw in modernist poetics.
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This essay considers the aesthetic and social contexts in which Canto 75 is situated, in particular the role of Janequin's Chant des Oiseaux in the work of Gerhart Münch and Olga Rudge, and the Concerti Tigulliani in the 1930s.
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Mina Loy was long considered a minor figure in Transatlantic literary modernism, but in recent decades she has taken her rightful place as a significant poet, artist and novelist, who helped develop Dada in the United States as well as... more
Mina Loy was long considered a minor figure in Transatlantic literary modernism, but in recent decades she has taken her rightful place as a significant poet, artist and novelist, who helped develop Dada in the United States as well as supporting Surrealist and Bauhaus aesthetics. Although British by birth, and later a United States citizen, Loy spent stretches of her adult life in Paris, Florence and Mexico City, and is now an icon of transnational modernism. Recent biographies, editions of her essays and stories, and new appreciation of her work in the visual and creative arts, provide a fuller perspective on this under-rated but radically innovative avant-garde writer’s career.
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The history of literature is replete with stories of sea migrations, the topographical potency of mountains, and the sparse allurements of the desert. But what might we make of narratives dealing with geographies lacking such thalassan... more
The history of literature is replete with stories of sea migrations, the topographical potency of mountains, and the sparse allurements of the desert. But what might we make of narratives dealing with geographies lacking such thalassan potentialities, arid purities, or the symbolic inducements of craggy altitudes? This paper will attempt to map out how Gerald Murnane negotiates inland semi-arid zones in his novels – with a special focus on Inland and The Plains – and will examine how elements of prose style contribute to the performance of this act. The steppe, plain, grassland––unvaried topography neither desert nor littoral, neither urban nor rural, yet a strangely replenishing source for agriculture, husbandry, and the history of human migrations––provide remarkably distinct material by which to understand their specific mediations of narrative modes. Further, such undifferentiated topographies impel deep reflection upon the very point of prose style: what is it for, and what is it meant to do?
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Early medieval philosophy and textuality afford crucial insights into the aesthetic project of The Cantos, notably the work of the Irish Carolingian thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, and his late classical (Martianus Capella, Boethius) and... more
Early medieval philosophy and textuality afford crucial insights into the aesthetic project of The Cantos, notably the work of the Irish Carolingian thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, and his late classical (Martianus Capella, Boethius) and Eastern Christian sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa). Pound absorbed much of this recondite knowledge by way of philosophy textbooks, as many of the source texts were simply not available to him in the 1930s and early 1940s. Pound also absorbed several facets of early medieval textual culture, and these are clearly visible in his poetry and prose. The early medieval surge in encyclopaedic texts, the gathering up of classical knowledge in urgent acts of preservation, bears acute analogy with Pound’s own encyclopaedic imperatives and practices. The text of The Cantos is significantly altered in its physical layout during this period of intensive reading and research in early medieval textuality. Pound even produces cantos on unrelated historical subjects – the life of John Adams, the dynastic history of China – that seem to mimic and emulate these earlier transformations in textual culture, performing these textual histories on the text’s surface.
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Pound stated in interview with Donald Hall that ‘Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct.’ Pound compares his project with Dante’s Paradiso, where the Florentine’s thrones... more
Pound stated in interview with Donald Hall that ‘Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct.’ Pound compares his project with Dante’s Paradiso, where the Florentine’s thrones ‘are for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good government,’ whilst Pound’s thrones ‘are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth.’ From the opening canto, Thrones takes Byzantium as one of its thematic focal points in the transition from the classical to the early medieval epoch. Pound draws on Alexander Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems (1895) and the Book of the Eparch of Leo the Wise, a late-ninth or early-tenth century text concerning the rules of commerce between guilds in Byzantium, rediscovered and translated by the Genevan Jules Nicole in 1891. Matters of currency and its implications for political power occupy the centre of the discourse on statecraft and responsible rule in the early medieval Mediterranean. The strengths of Byzantine rule are on display in its legal system, monetary policy, and in the supreme aesthetic achievement of the mosaics in Ravenna. The visage of Justinian the Great, Byzantine Emperor between 527 and 565 and the first emperor to appear on coinage bearing the Christian cross, as well as that of his consort Theodora, grace the apse of the Basilica di San Vitale. His rule was distinctive for his codification of Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis and the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Byzantium, a neat rhyme with Abd al-Malik’s construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem a century later. These intersections of law, civil administration and treasury serve as prime exemplars for Pound in Thrones, alongside other examples such as the Sacred Edict of Confucian conduct composed by the fourth Qing emperor Kangxi in the seventeenth century, and the Institutions of the Laws of England by Edward Coke, a leading Elizabethan-Jacobean Attorney General and Chief Justice. Notions of just commerce and transparency in the establishment of monetary value are embedded in, and reflecting in the high aesthetic achievements of these different cultural spheres. Byzantium, in this sense, is a kind of blueprint for successful statecraft and economic policy Pound attempts to identify in a range of historical moments leading to his contemporary support for the policies of Social Credit.
Research Interests: Modernist poetry, Silk Road Studies, Early Medieval History, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Ezra Pound, and 10 moreCarolingian Studies, Modern American Literature, Modernism, Byzantium, Economics and Literature, Ravenna, Byzantine Mosaics, Roman Mosaics, Silk Industry, and Eastern Roman Empire
Given Ezra Pound’s sustained interest in languages, translation, and systems of inscription, as well as his formidable literary archive, it seems odd at first glance that Derrida should show relatively little direct interest in a poet... more
Given Ezra Pound’s sustained interest in languages, translation, and systems of inscription, as well as his formidable literary archive, it seems odd at first glance that Derrida should show relatively little direct interest in a poet whose shadow still looms over modern and contemporary poetry in English––not to mention poetry in Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese. Pound’s lifelong fascination with Neoplatonism exposed him to negative theology, and his experiments with the Chinese language and systems of inscription in his epic poem, The Cantos, marks out his poetics as one of sustained meditation on the nature of the sign and the latencies of signification. One might consider Pound’s aesthetics, his philosophical outlook, and even his politics, and think of a number of Derrida’s more well-known works as candidates for direct dialogue: Of Grammatology for “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry”; Archive Fever for Pound’s own immense, porous archive; Acts of Literature for The Cantos; and so on. Derrida famously professed an aversion to writing on Samuel Beckett by virtue of what he saw as an inhibiting intellectual proximity. Derrida and Pound seem to be in little danger of any similar problem, and the paucity of direct engagement might be seen to confirm a sense of indifference. The following discussion will argue that Pound and Derrida share important intellectual terrain despite the divergences in their attitudes, aesthetics, and modes of thought. By necessity it will be selective rather than exhaustive, taking the themes of signification, archives, and negative theology as points of orientation.
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This essay takes as its focus Ezra Pound’s early years in London – the ‘British Museum years’, as he called them in Canto LXXX – and how his early engagement with East Asian art, particularly Chinese painting, shaped his aesthetic and... more
This essay takes as its focus Ezra Pound’s early years in London – the ‘British Museum years’, as he called them in Canto LXXX – and how his early engagement with East Asian art, particularly Chinese painting, shaped his aesthetic and returned at pivotal points during his career. The influences of Chinese poetry, Japanese Nō, and other verbal and performative traditions on Pound’s writing were of course profound, and in several senses these traditions overlap or intersect with those of the visual arts: the visual emphasis Pound gave to Chinese writing in his adaptation of Fenollosa’s essay ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry’; Pound’s sensitivity to elements of the Nō stage set, such as the green needles of the pine trees and the elaborate costuming of the shite; or his interest in kōdō or ‘the way of incense’ picked up when reading Frank Brinkley’s Japan: Its History, Art and Literature (1901) during his residence in Stone Cottage with W. B. Yeats (Araujo 2018: 114). An extensive scholarly tradition treats Pound’s Chinese and Japanese literary aesthetics in fine detail, and this essay will not seek to provide an epitome of that tradition except where it informs specifically visuals aspects of Pound’s East Asian aesthetic. Instead, a focus on Pound’s early interactions with Chinese painting shows how specific artworks, and the genres they exemplified, installed themselves in Pound’s aesthetic repertoire, providing him with a wellspring upon which he could draw at later points in his poetic career.
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Canto 36 functions as a kind of still point amidst the political and historical material imbuing Eleven New Cantos: the Continental Congress of 1774-89 and Siena under the rule of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Holy Roman Emperor. The... more
Canto 36 functions as a kind of still point amidst the political and historical material imbuing Eleven New Cantos: the Continental Congress of 1774-89 and Siena under the rule of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Holy Roman Emperor. The greater part of the poem comprises Pound’s final authoritative translation of Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone ‘Donna mi prega,’ followed by two verse paragraphs dealing with the intellectual and poetic provenance of Guido’s ideas. The nature of these ideas is broadly well known: for Pound, Guido’s philosophical vocabulary transmits certain aspects of Neoplatonism as well as the psychology implied in Aristotle’s De anima. As Pound explains in his essay ‘Cavalcanti’ in Make It New (1934), Guido received these ideas directly or otherwise from a variety of sources, notably John Scottus Eriugena and Robert Grosseteste on one hand, and the great medieval Islamic tradition of Avicenna and Averroes on the other. This essay explores this terrain in more detail, providing greater context for Pound’s claims of intellectual provenance in a close reading of the poem. The Islamic inheritance in particular is far more complex than has been acknowledged, and certainly well beyond Pound’s explicit understanding of the matter. However he was right to place great emphasis on Cavalcanti’s vocabulary: attention to the ways in which Avicenna and Averroes understood the concepts of the diafan, the agent and possible intellects, and the mechanism by which the individual soul makes contact with divine intelligence, all clarify the argument as set out in Cavalcanti’s poem and represented in Pound’s translation. This clarification also makes more explicit the links with the lines following Pound’s translation concerning Eriugena and the Italian Troubadour Sordello da Goito.
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The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as... more
The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as precursors to Dante’s great elder contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti. Pound placed sufficient stock in Guido’s shaping role in the European poetic tradition that he undertook to publish a deluxe edition of the Rime, complete with photographic plates of manuscripts on vellum, putting more than one press out of business in the process. It was not only poetry that drove this fixation for Pound, but a conviction that medieval poets kept alight a flame of Gnostic wisdom counter to the predominating currents of Thomistic inflections of Aristotle. He saw in Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel the preservation of light philosophy reaching back beyond Grosseteste and Eriugena to the Presocratics and the early Neoplatonists. A tenuous but pivotal part of this hidden heritage resided in the Arabic transmission of classical texts, as well as major commentaries, especially those of Avicenna and Averroes on Aristotle’s De Anima. Scholars such as Peter Liebregts and Peter Makin have done admirable work in identifying and annotating the various citations and suggestive hints of this tradition throughout Pound’s poetry and prose. This paper seeks to establish wider aesthetic and strategic contexts for Pound’s use of medieval Arabic light philosophy: what purpose did this heritage serve for the poet who urged his peers to Make It New? How does it inflect his poetics, and how does it intersect with his personal and professional circumstances at particular points in his career? This attempt to give a broader picture to Pound’s very particular medievalism aims to give perspective on Modernist poetics, shaped in significant part by his influence.
Research Interests: Neoplatonism and late antique philosophy, Medievalism, Modernist poetry, Islamic Philosophy, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), and 10 moreEzra Pound, Modernism, Guido Cavalcanti, Neoplatonism, Islamic Thought & Philosophy, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Alfarabi, and Medieval Aristotle Reception
As a Modernist epic poem, Ezra Pound’s Cantos demonstrates an aspiration towards the encyclopaedic, ranging across political, literary and intellectual history, geography, philosophy, economics, and so on. Pound scholars have long exerted... more
As a Modernist epic poem, Ezra Pound’s Cantos demonstrates an aspiration towards the encyclopaedic, ranging across political, literary and intellectual history, geography, philosophy, economics, and so on. Pound scholars have long exerted considerable effort in tracking down sources and discerning intertextual references in his poem. The Cantos simulates the materiality of various literary forms on its surface – parliamentary speeches, Papal encyclicals, ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, imperial decrees, epistles, as well as numerous literary genres and an array of languages and scripts. In a sense the poem is a (selective) primer in historical bibliography. The ways in which it deploys its intertextual examples include partial or full citations, glosses, and annotations. These techniques are of particular significance in the context of Pound’s early medieval sources (John Scottus Eriugena, Pseudo-Dionysius, Martianus Capella), for it is in the shift from late classical textuality to early medieval and Carolingian textuality that many of these techniques became properly codified. The way late classical authors were absorbed in the Carolingian context is something that scholars such as Rosamond McKitterick, Bernard Bischoff and others have considered for decades, but the relevance to Pound and to other Modernists has been almost completely overlooked. The urge to encyclopaedism in particular is a direct point of connection between these phases of cultural activity, and is so prominent in both epochs that it's frankly astonishing that the link has yet to be drawn. My paper will attempt a schematic exploration of the way technologies of textuality in early medieval and Modernist epochs come together in Pound’s ‘poem containing history,’ with specific attention to such features as the physical distribution of text material within the codex, intellectual apparatus such as glosses and annotations, and the concept of encyclopaedism within each cultural-historical formation.
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The event of Modernism was in its essence a foundationally Transnational event: the collaborations and conflicts between artists, writers and composers in such centres as Paris, London, Vienna and New York fomented a radical creativity... more
The event of Modernism was in its essence a foundationally Transnational event: the collaborations and conflicts between artists, writers and composers in such centres as Paris, London, Vienna and New York fomented a radical creativity across artistic forms, but also across concepts of history and nation. Several leading Modernist figures set their sights even further afield in an attempt to rethink art on a global scale. Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese art, literature and written language is a vivid case in point: he inherited a naïve sense of Chinese language and a rich source of Chinese poetic paraphrase from the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa, often working between English, French and Japanese at significant remove from his target language. His interest in the Chinese visual arts also drew him to the pastoral genre of rustication, much as his Transcendentalist predecessors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau had done in the previous century. Later in his career Pound made serious attempts to learn Mandarin and to better understand the linguistic composition of the Chinese written character. These efforts are reflected in later instalments of his epic poem The Cantos, and have come into focus in recent scholarship seeking to disentangle Pound’s obvious sinolinguistic shortcomings from the ways in which he installs a translated Chinese aesthetic into his poetic practice: in other words, to see how a certain model of ‘China’ might be considered to be a Modernist invention, but one which makes available a critical, reciprocating model for translation. Pound responds to the events of his life during and after the Second World War to question the function of political exile in the Chinese pastoral tradition. By turning to the southwest fringes of Empire in the non-Confucian, non-Han Na-Khi ethnic minority, Pound effects a rusticated pastoral critique of nation: a potent kind of anti-national Transnationalism.
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Johannes Scotus Eriugena, the ninth-century theologian and poet, serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione... more
Johannes Scotus Eriugena, the ninth-century theologian and poet, serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae, provides Pound with a totalising account of history in its exegetical model of the reditus (the return of creation to the godhead), an eschatology which accompanies Pound’s other preferred models for a paradiso terrestre: the Confucian world order and Italian Fascism. To date there exists a small, select range of critical scholarship on Eriugena’s significance in Pound’s prose and poetry. This Carolingian thinker plays a crucial part in Pound’s development of an anti-Aquinian view of medieval theology, and forms part of an obscured tradition that is in itself millennial, and which serves to overturn what Pound saw as conventional, retrograde religious and social eschatologies. Eriugena’s significance is evident in critical passages of the Cantos – particularly Canto XXXVI, the ‘Donna mi prega’ canto, and the Pisan Cantos – as well as in Pound’s prose. Pound also composed extensive notes for a book on Eriugena, to form a trilogy with his books on the Ta Hio and Mencius, but which never eventuated in publication. These notes throw additional light onto the crucial role Eriugena plays for Pound in his vision for the paradisal poet who speaks for and from the end of days.
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Among the experimental literary works of Modernism, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt bears a singular reputation for its complex, fragmented narrative structure: its many footnotes, musical scores, “manuscript” perforations, and extended... more
Among the experimental literary works of Modernism, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt bears a singular reputation for its complex, fragmented narrative structure: its many footnotes, musical scores, “manuscript” perforations, and extended prose sequences of combinatorial logic, give it emblematic status as an avant-garde challenge to literary convention. This status is endowed further when the novel’s very extensive manuscript archive is taken into account. This repository comprises nearly a thousand pages of drafts, revisions, and substantial narrative divergences from the published text. The manuscripts are famous in their own right as aesthetic objects, but very few scholars have read or studied them at any length, preliminary to any attempt to measure their evolution against published editions of the novel. The logic of a digital edition of this complex manuscript material seems clear: to provide clear ways of mapping the network of confluences and divergences between manuscript and published text, as a first, critical step towards exploring their semantic and hermeneutic implications. Current work on a digital edition of the Watt manuscripts forms part of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project – a large, international project that aims to digitize all of Beckett’s literary manuscripts – and already suggests new modes of viewing the novel’s narrative, as well as new insights into Modernist narrative experimentation more generally. The complex and often very subtle relationships between elements of the manuscript text – many of which do not appear in full or at all in the published text – are eminently conducive to digital display. This in turn provides the careful reader with a more precisely calibrated appreciation for the reticulated networks of reference, association, and narrative lines in the manuscript material, and the implications of their recycled, revised or omitted status in the published text. Such a digital remediation of archival documents provides benefits beyond the practical reach of print-based editions: the ability to visualize complex networks of citation and association across a large manuscript, including multiple page views, as well as various methods by which to quantify, collate and interpret highly imbricated narrative material. In turn, a comprehensive digital presentation of an iconic Modernist manuscript comprises a powerful argument for strategic digital interventions in traditional humanities scholarship. This essay will explore several critical insights arising from this digital edition, and the mutual implications for literary studies and for digital humanities.
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Samuel Beckett’s and Thomas Bernhard’s narrators and characters are well known for their extended rants and disquisitions, ranging from blunt incursions (Arsene’s rant in Part I of Watt) to entire narratives (Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Old... more
Samuel Beckett’s and Thomas Bernhard’s narrators and characters are well known for their extended rants and disquisitions, ranging from blunt incursions (Arsene’s rant in Part I of Watt) to entire narratives (Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Old Masters). These episodes or narratives can be seen as bearing the weight of barbed comedy, akin to invective or satire, but they often operate as modes of cathartic relief in other ways. Typologies of unrestrained discursive outpourings function significantly in the history of rhetoric: the philippic was a genre of sustained critique (describing Demosthenes’ speeches against Philip II of Macedon, and emulated by Cicero against Mark Antony); the harangue developed in the later Middle Ages as a rhetorical mode of martial invigoration; and the diatribe, as a strategy of speaking with a real or imagined interlocutor, features in classical pedagogy, especially that of the Sophists, Cynics and Stoics, and in biblical texts such as the New Testament letters of Paul. Each of these genres feature extensively in the novels of Beckett and Bernhard. Yet the timing and function of the diatribe provides a special view of the motivations of speakers and narrators: bestowing their dogmatic assertions to a necessary but acquiescent audience, these speakers shape their continuous outpourings not merely as modes of invective, but as a means to think through particular themes or problems. The diatribe becomes a form of meditation, comic in its rhetorical and narratological textures, but deeply significant in its ability to extend a mode of thinking that might otherwise remain latent. Beckett’s and Bernhard’s diatribes perform the estrangements of ideation, identity and sociality that motivate their narrators and characters into a rhetoric of defence, by means of a deft recalibration of this powerful, underrated rhetorical form.
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The Gate Theatre and Blue Angel Films production of the film Waiting for Godot broaches the sensitive issues of filmic adaptation and directorial interpretation of Beckett's most iconic and principal dramatic text. The film presents a... more
The Gate Theatre and Blue Angel Films production of the film Waiting for Godot broaches the sensitive issues of filmic adaptation and directorial interpretation of Beckett's most iconic and principal dramatic text. The film presents a thoughtful and sensitive version of the play, taking into account the practical and formal requirements of the change in medium. Yet the near-absolute fidelity to dialogue and to stage directions belies a profound and decisive interpretation of the play's concluding scene. Following the second appearance of the boy (or of the second boy), Vladimir is shown to undergo something of an anagnorisis in straightforwardly classical terms. In other words, he undergoes the recognition that marks him out as a tragic figure in the Greek mould (and in accordance with Aristotle's Poetics). From this point until the end of the play, Vladimir's tone and demeanour is utterly transformed, and the distance established between his being and that of Estragon is absolute. They occupy different worlds in the same space: Estragon remains in the ambiguous, apathetic present, whilst Vladimir, in full understanding of what has come to pass, is caught up in the machinery of classical Greek tragedy. His awareness of this sharpens his plight to Oedipal or Oresteian proportions.
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Samuel Beckett’s relationship with the literature of his mother tongue is understandably complex. His education at Trinity College, Dublin and his subsequent autodidactic course of study served to provide him with a broad range of... more
Samuel Beckett’s relationship with the literature of his mother tongue is understandably complex. His education at Trinity College, Dublin and his subsequent autodidactic course of study served to provide him with a broad range of literary genres and textual exemplars across the history of the English language. His study of English literature in the earlier phases of life was complemented by that of other modern European languages such as Italian and French, and later, German and Spanish. The long shadow of his fellow Dubliners, especially James Joyce, was cast across his first forays into literary composition, and he conducted his mature literary life largely displaced from any significant Anglophone community. Beckett’s literary precocity and longevity meant that he drew deeply from the experiments of modernism and wrote through a number of cultural phases, perhaps most notably French existentialism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, with which he has been associated and against which he has been measured. Beckett’s mediation of the English language and Anglophone literature is characterised by a general shift from his earlier works, in which direct intertextual reference and stylistic emulation tend to prevail, to the later, more subtle and critically reflective deployments of literary genres, tropes and stylistic echoes, operating in a truly polyglot and immanent compositional milieu. Beckett’s use of source material is recursive across his career: whilst there are significant differences in method and tone between the earliest works composed in English and later works that mediate English and French (and occasionally German), even very late works draw on literary concepts and materials honed in Beckett’s formative years at Trinity and in London.
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Many Anglo-American modernist authors were aware of and associated with their musician counterparts: several wrote as music critics for journals in London, Paris, and New York, and some occasionally attempted musical projects of their own... more
Many Anglo-American modernist authors were aware of and associated with their musician counterparts: several wrote as music critics for journals in London, Paris, and New York, and some occasionally attempted musical projects of their own devising, or in collaboration with established musicians. The rich cultural and historical contexts in which literary modernism and music (modernist or otherwise) interacted tell of the aesthetic aspirations of individual writers and, more generally, "of the age." This field of scholarship that has grown around this topic continues to do so with new archival research and critical review. Indeed, the relations between music and literature in modernism have received, for the most part, thorough treatment by literary critics and historians (such as Marjorie Perloff, Steven Adams, and Roger Shattuck).
The present essay attempts to explore the relationship between music and modernist text production from the perspective of literary composition and the status of aesthetic objects. Rather than treat the interaction of music and literature as simply a thematic or rhetorical device, this essay will observe how the two media productively cohabit aesthetic space. In particular, the essay will focus on three cases where musical notation actually occurs within a literary text: the violin line of Clément Janequin's Le Chant des Oiseaux in Canto LXXV of Ezra Pound's Cantos, the score of "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and the threnes and choruses in Samuel Beckett's Watt.
The presence of musical scores in such works is entirely in keeping with their eclectic styles and modes, yet is of a quite specific significance: each text interrogates its status as a literary object, and uses musical notation as a means of interrogation. Music signifies a generic crossing-over, a way of developing aesthetic concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the "total artwork" that entails the genres of music, poetry, visual art, etc.) and the paragone (the classical comparison between the arts). But in these particular examples, the embedding of one artwork within another also indicates the way each text questions the grounds of its construction and composition. Each of Canto LXXV, Finnegans Wake and Watt was composed under conditions of exile and dislocation, and each text endured a somewhat ambiguous and difficult journey into print. Their provisional histories as literary objects intersect with the fuzzy ontological boundaries they share with other media.
After elaborating the relation between the scores and each text in which they are embedded, this essay will describe the specific way each text interrogates its aesthetic and ontological grounds. The essay will conclude with some remarks on the possibilities for rethinking modernist text status and production, and for situating the complex interactions between music and literature found in these texts more broadly within modernist literary culture. Pound, Joyce and Beckett sought to examine the very fabric of their medium. The presence and location of music within their work provides a mechanism through which the writer and reader can engage in such a meditation.
The present essay attempts to explore the relationship between music and modernist text production from the perspective of literary composition and the status of aesthetic objects. Rather than treat the interaction of music and literature as simply a thematic or rhetorical device, this essay will observe how the two media productively cohabit aesthetic space. In particular, the essay will focus on three cases where musical notation actually occurs within a literary text: the violin line of Clément Janequin's Le Chant des Oiseaux in Canto LXXV of Ezra Pound's Cantos, the score of "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and the threnes and choruses in Samuel Beckett's Watt.
The presence of musical scores in such works is entirely in keeping with their eclectic styles and modes, yet is of a quite specific significance: each text interrogates its status as a literary object, and uses musical notation as a means of interrogation. Music signifies a generic crossing-over, a way of developing aesthetic concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the "total artwork" that entails the genres of music, poetry, visual art, etc.) and the paragone (the classical comparison between the arts). But in these particular examples, the embedding of one artwork within another also indicates the way each text questions the grounds of its construction and composition. Each of Canto LXXV, Finnegans Wake and Watt was composed under conditions of exile and dislocation, and each text endured a somewhat ambiguous and difficult journey into print. Their provisional histories as literary objects intersect with the fuzzy ontological boundaries they share with other media.
After elaborating the relation between the scores and each text in which they are embedded, this essay will describe the specific way each text interrogates its aesthetic and ontological grounds. The essay will conclude with some remarks on the possibilities for rethinking modernist text status and production, and for situating the complex interactions between music and literature found in these texts more broadly within modernist literary culture. Pound, Joyce and Beckett sought to examine the very fabric of their medium. The presence and location of music within their work provides a mechanism through which the writer and reader can engage in such a meditation.
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The American Modernist poet Ezra Pound carried a lifelong fascination with the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, seeing in Dante’s contemporary a model for combining complex poetic technique with difficult philosophical concepts. His serial... more
The American Modernist poet Ezra Pound carried a lifelong fascination with the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, seeing in Dante’s contemporary a model for combining complex poetic technique with difficult philosophical concepts. His serial translations of the canzone “Donna mi prega” demonstrate Pound’s evolving notion of how medieval theology incorporated (or failed to properly incorporate) classical philosophy, and suggest the kinds of sources Pound wanted to use for the paradiso phase of his epic poem The Cantos. Pound was trained in medieval philology at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College, NY, at a time when techniques in Romance philology were perhaps less robust than they became later in the twentieth century. Despite his impatience with scholarship at the time, his aptitudes are clear enough: during the 1920s and 30s Pound visited numerous libraries across Italy and undertook careful comparative analysis of every known textual witness of Cavalcanti’s poetry he could find; and in various essays eventually collected in “Cavalcanti 1910 / 1931” (published in Make It New in 1934), he put forward specific readings of textual variants informed by an extensive knowledge of the textual and critical tradition. This paper will canvas Pound’s philological work on Cavalcanti’s poetry and outline his attempts to publish a critical edition of the Rime over the course of several decades. It will also make some claims for the role of Cavalcanti in Pound’s epic The Cantos, especially in the context of Pound’s extensive debts to Dante and the Commedia, as well as to other poets such as Sordello da Goito and the Provençal troubadours.
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Ezra Pound’s modern epic poem The Cantos aspires to the inexhaustibility of his predecessors Dante and Homer. The poem’s themes span the history of civilizations (east and west), philosophy, theology, politics, economy, as well as... more
Ezra Pound’s modern epic poem The Cantos aspires to the inexhaustibility of his predecessors Dante and Homer. The poem’s themes span the history of civilizations (east and west), philosophy, theology, politics, economy, as well as contemporary matters of war and social change. Pound draws deeply on his cultural heritage, deploying a wide range of source materials from the Greek and Roman classical spheres, as well as the lights of high medieval culture in the troubadour poets, the Paris philosophers, and the Tuscan poets Dante and Guido Cavalcanti. As Pound attempts to establish the foundations for the paradiso section of his epic, he turns, conspicuously, to early medieval sources such as Martianus Capella and the Eastern Church Fathers (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor), sensitive to their reception in the translations and commentaries of the great ninth-century theologian and translator John Scottus Eriugena. Pound intended to use Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon, as an eschatological framework for the concluding sections of The Cantos until war and incarceration changed its direction and tenor. Why did Pound, almost entirely alone among the major Modernist poets, draw so heavily upon early medieval sources? This paper sketches out a preliminary answer to this question, evaluating the encyclopaedic intensities of Pound’s poem and the way he discerned early medieval sources themselves to function as models of preservation and reception of classical (especially late-classical) knowledge. Pound’s early medievalism is a key mode of his thinking, both in terms of cultural preservation and poetic experimentation: a much fuller exploration of this theme is now possible and timely in the context of recent significant advances in early medieval scholarship.
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In his lengthy Afterword to Mountains and Rivers Without End, Gary Snyder describes the fundamental role Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa played in guiding him to the aesthetic traditions of China and Japan. He then goes on to say this is... more
In his lengthy Afterword to Mountains and Rivers Without End, Gary Snyder describes the fundamental role Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa played in guiding him to the aesthetic traditions of China and Japan. He then goes on to say this is his point of departure with literary modernism, which he felt did not have much else to provide him. This paper will argue that Snyder’s ‘Japanese’ poems thus demonstrate a complex double history, marking a repudiation of modernist poetics whilst deploying its turn eastwards in his own reappraisal of East Asian aesthetics. I will evaluate two kinds of poems – ‘Toji,’ a Kyoto temple poem of the 1960s, and ‘Endless Rivers and Mountains’ a scroll poem composed in the United States at a later date – to show how Snyder performs a kind of alluvial history, his poems critically evaluating the sediment or ‘riprap’ of earlier poetical histories, as well as being constituted by them. In each poem Snyder is able to move beyond the orientalism of Pound and Fenollosa, however well-intentioned and well-informed it may have been for it time, and to generate a poetics that is linguistically and culturally sensitive to its sources whilst also stripping away a sedimented Western sentimentality. ‘Toji’ takes an ironic view of ‘Zen tourism’ in contemporary Kyoto, mixing its iconographic observations with the demotic activities of that city’s residents, and by this, it marks a break with the sentiments of ‘Old Japan’ Snyder saw in Pound and Fenollosa. ‘Endless Rivers and Mountains’ dramatises the act of viewing a landscape scroll and its centuries of commentaries and assertions of ownership, and situates the ekphrastic object within its context of preservation (and reification) in a North American museum. Snyder’s poetics are thus alluvial, recording the processes of philology and history (both Japanese and Western) washing through the fabric of poems and paintings, and performing the granularity that such an inheritance exhibits on its surface.
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Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts.... more
Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson’s biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling’s edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett’s reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett’s textual habitus. Given this profound reappraisal of Beckett’s material processes of composition, this paper seeks to show that Beckett’s late prose work, Worstward Ho, represents a profound mediation on writing, self-citation, and habits of allusion to the literary canon. In its epic gestures, it reorients the heavenly aspiration of Dante’s Commedia earthwards, invoking instead the language of agriculture, geology and masonry in the process of creating and decreating its imaginative space. Beckett’s earthy epic invokes and erodes the first principles of narrative by way of philology as well as by means of deft reference to literary texts and images preoccupied with land, farming, and geological formations. This process – the invocation and erosion of narrative, character, semantics, and syntax – is described in the word corrasion, a geological term referring to the erosion of rock by various forms of water, ice, snow and moraine. Textual excursions into philology in Worstward Ho also unearth the strata comprising Beckett’s corpus (in particular Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, and Ill Seen Ill Said), as well as the rock or canon upon which his own literary production is built. A close reading of Worstward Ho turns up a number of shrewd allusions to the King James Bible and Thomas Browne, as one might expect, but also perhaps surprisingly sustained affinities with the literary sensibilities of Alexander Pope and the poetry of S. T. Coleridge. The more one digs, the more Beckett’s ‘little epic’ seems to become one of earthworks, bits of pipe, and masonry, a site and record of literary sedimentation.
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Arriving roughly halfway through Thrones, Canto CI is pivotal not only to this decad but to Pound’s entire project in The Cantos. The canto exhibits a fascination with the Na-Khi Chinese ethnic minority and its matriarchal social... more
Arriving roughly halfway through Thrones, Canto CI is pivotal not only to this decad but to Pound’s entire project in The Cantos. The canto exhibits a fascination with the Na-Khi Chinese ethnic minority and its matriarchal social structures, modulated by glancing attention to the cultural heritage of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, as well as further exploration of the Napoleonic era and the aftermath of Revolutionary ideals. Whilst there exists some excellent, if strictly non-specialist scholarly work on the role of the Na-Khi of south-western China in this and other cantos within Thrones, the wider implications for The Cantos have yet to be fully explored. Pound’s reading of Joseph Rock’s botanical and ethnographic studies of the Na-Khi opens up some fertile biographical and historical space in which to think through Pound’s latter-day internal exile at St Elizabeths. In this canto Pound engages one of his more striking strategies with regard to cultural and political commentary: he modulates an imperial centre (Napoleon) with a periphery (the Na-Khi). The added dynamism of the Mongolian Khanate itself shifts radically from periphery to centre and back again in its rise and decline within Chinese Imperial history. What is the reason for this strategy at this point in The Cantos beyond intellectual habit and long-standing meditation upon political power and its ephemeral agency?
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The Australian Modernist artist Margaret Preston represents a singular pioneering example of transcultural aesthetics. Her painting and print-making unites European, Australian and Japanese artistic techniques and subject matter in a... more
The Australian Modernist artist Margaret Preston represents a singular pioneering example of transcultural aesthetics. Her painting and print-making unites European, Australian and Japanese artistic techniques and subject matter in a subtle and under-appreciated body of work. Preston’s pedigree was very respectable for an Australian artist of her time (her dates are 1875-1963) – she was tutored in various art schools in Australia, Germany, Paris and London as well as undertaking extensive workshop experience – but it was her turn east (actually north from an Australian perspective) that began a slow reorientation of artistic priorities and influences in the Australian scene. Her experimentation with Japanese ukiyo-e print-making techniques, and its adaptation to Australian subjects distinguishes her within Australian art. Her mastery of these techniques, allied with her sensitivity in the use of her subject matter, gives Preston immense status as an artist with an acute insight into transcultural poetics. My paper is a small gesture toward giving this experimental Modernist belated recognition for her avowedly counter-orientalist engagements with Japanese art.
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Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts.... more
Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson’s biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling’s edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett’s reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett’s textual habitus. Recent work relating Beckett’s thinking to neuroscience (Laura Salisbury, Ulrika Maude, Elizabeth Barry) and to the notion of the ‘extended mind’ (Dirk Van Hulle) also present fascinating possibilities for rethinking the relation between the representation of cognitive faculties, embodiment, and textual forms in Beckett’s writing. This paper seeks to explore this convergence of textual genetics and neuroscience by critically evaluating the way Beckett organises and deploys his source materials in often subtle networks of allusion and citation, and to think through this distinctly modernist philology as a kind of ‘embodiment of mind.’ I will show how Beckett’s late prose work, Worstward Ho, is a prime example of this approach to writing, examining how narrative, character, semantics, and syntax are slowly eroded by their own self-awareness (the title of this paper alludes to this process of self-erosion in the word corrasion, a geological term referring to the erosion of rock by various forms of water, ice, snow and moraine). I will also consider whether the form of Worstward Ho, as language folds in on itself, can be considered cognate to the gyri and sulci, the ridges and grooves in the human cortex that provide the human brain with significantly enhanced neural connectivity and processing power. This folded structure of the text enables Worstward Ho to manifest intensive creativity in the process of interrogating and eroding the means by which such creativity comes into being, in language.
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Chinese history, literature and aesthetics fascinated writers on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. French Symboliste poets inherited the established fashions of chinoiserie, while the New England Transcendentalist... more
Chinese history, literature and aesthetics fascinated writers on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. French Symboliste poets inherited the established fashions of chinoiserie, while the New England Transcendentalist poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were keenly influenced by Confucian texts they understood in translation. This curiosity prepared the way for Modernism’s intensive engagements with such historical materials as Tang poetry and Song painting in the translations and poetic compositions of Ezra Pound, as well as the use of Chinese iconography by such writers as Bertolt Brecht, Marianne Moore, and others. Recent scholarship has proposed that Western writers did not simply adapt classical Chinese materials to adorn their poetry and drama, but that a Chinese aesthetic fundamentally and actively shaped avant-garde aesthetics in Western cultural centres. This view of Chinese aesthetics as a vigorous element of Transatlantic Modernism neatly dovetails with recent revaluations and definitions of Modernist Chinese art and literature. Chinese Modernism is commonly posed to be an historically belated phenomenon when viewed through the lens of global literary studies, but recent work on the writing of Lu Xun and the painting of Lin Fengmian (to take only two examples) suggests a much closer temporal and aesthetic relationship with the work of the European avant-garde. This paper will consider reappraisals of Chinese Modernism and of the Chinese ‘DNA’ within Transatlantic Modernism as complementary gestures of sinography, exploring new perspectives on China’s role in aesthetics and literature in the modern age.
Research Interests:
Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts.... more
Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett’s sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson’s biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling’s edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett’s reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett’s textual habitus. Recent work relating Beckett’s thinking to neuroscience (Laura Salisbury, Ulrika Maude, Elizabeth Barry) and to the notion of the ‘extended mind’ (Dirk Van Hulle) also present fascinating possibilities for rethinking the relation between the representation of cognitive faculties, embodiment, and textual forms in Beckett’s writing. This paper seeks to explore this convergence by critically evaluating the way Beckett organises and deploys his source materials in often subtle networks of allusion and citation, and to think through this distinctly modernist philology as a kind of ‘embodiment of mind.’ More specifically, this paper will ask: can these philological networks, spanning the notebooks and published texts of the novel Watt, as well as the philosophy notebooks and other source material, be considered a textual cognate to the gyri and sulci, the ridges and grooves, that feature in the human cortex, providing the human brain with significantly enhanced neural connectivity and processing power? Can this brain model of the genetic archive tell us something new about the ways in which its various parts connect to produce a textual condition of much greater subtlety and complexity than current textual models might accommodate?
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Samuel Beckett’s association with avant-garde artists and writers in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s gave him direct access to the theories and practices of Surrealism: his translations of poems by Paul Eluard and André Breton in... more
Samuel Beckett’s association with avant-garde artists and writers in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s gave him direct access to the theories and practices of Surrealism: his translations of poems by Paul Eluard and André Breton in the Surrealist number of This Quarter in 1932 (with Breton as guest editor) is a case in point, albeit one part of Beckett’s wide-ranging efforts at poetic translation at this time. Famously, Beckett also signed the ‘Poetry Is Vertical’ manifesto, published in transition in 1932, but this had as much to do with his close friendship with Thomas MacGreevy as it did with any aesthetic conviction on Beckett’s part. Beckett was at no point a card-carrying Surrealist, but did this aesthetic movement bear influence upon his work beyond those formative Paris years? This paper seeks to evaluate this question by critically examining a small number of Beckett’s later prose texts. Such ‘closed space’ texts as Imagination Dead Imagine, Ping and Lessness have been considered variously as exercises in literary ‘decreation,’ as critical evaluations of fictiveness, of the narrative representation of the real, of the subject, of literary and cultural history, and so on. The distinctly ekphrastic tenor of these prose works adds a spatial dimension to such hermeneutic schemata set more firmly within temporal and linguistic dimensions, providing additional means of reading these texts as narrative experiments with Surrealist imagery and technique. Beckett’s last major prose work in English, Worstward Ho, is a critical embodiment of these techniques of decreation, evolving and devolving narrative subjectivity, all by means of a diminishing spatial and imagistic palette. The philological intensity of this last major work might be read as Beckett’s farewell to language: in its linguistic deformations and in its sparsely tidal mise-en-scène, this story can be considered as a critical exploration of literary deterritorialization cognate with the Surrealist experiments of half a century before.
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Ezra Pound’s long association with Venice traverses his entire career: from his first published volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (Venice: A. Antonini, 1908), to pivotal moments in his epic The Cantos, a ‘poem including history,’ to his... more
Ezra Pound’s long association with Venice traverses his entire career: from his first published volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (Venice: A. Antonini, 1908), to pivotal moments in his epic The Cantos, a ‘poem including history,’ to his funeral at San Giorgio Maggiore and burial at San Michele. Far more than a topic of image and allusion, Venice also imbues the textual and bibliographical dimensions of Pound’s poetry, primarily with respect to the great Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. Pound was acutely aware of the value of the Aldine editions in his possession, and went to considerable efforts to understand the historical context and value of book design and typography. These themes arise in his poetry as a kind of history of typography, most evident in the deluxe editions of A Draft of XVI Cantos (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925) and A Draft of XXX Cantos (Paris: Hours Press, 1930). A number of scholars have explored Pound’s Aldine preoccupations and their manifestations in his work. This essay attempts to situate this theme within the broader aspirations of Pound’s poetry, to write a poem that critically examines modes of textuality across history and across cultures: from the representation of Sappho’s dialect, to Roman Imperial edicts, to the codification of line glossing and annotation in Carolingian textual culture, the history of Chinese writing, through to developments in Renaissance and early modern textuality. The Aldine pivot on which this enterprise revolves reflects the critical moment at which printing transformed an erstwhile manuscript culture.
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Debate over the theoretical and practical relations between the terms document, work and text has taken on renewed energy in recent years, not least in the continuing discussion between Paul Eggert, Peter Shillingsburg, Peter Robinson,... more
Debate over the theoretical and practical relations between the terms document, work and text has taken on renewed energy in recent years, not least in the continuing discussion between Paul Eggert, Peter Shillingsburg, Peter Robinson, and Hans Walter Gabler as well as other leading figures in textual scholarship. These terms take on new significance in the age of digital texts and editions, and deserve careful explication in order to be deployed effectively in the production of scholarly editions and in the understanding of digital textuality. This paper seeks to explore how these terms critically inflect an understanding of Modernist manuscripts, and particularly their realisation in models of digital scholarly editions. Specifically, Eggert’s notion of work-genesis provides a powerful notion of textual emergence in manuscript as well as in publication, and offers an elegant combination of critical model and practical description of Modernist manuscripts, even those that have escaped currently prevailing editorial models such as textual genetics. The paper will discuss examples of digital editions of Modernist manuscripts as instances of work-genesis, continuing beyond the scene of authorial composition, into evolving digital representations and outwardly to readers’ potential strategies of reception.
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Pound’s pastoral meditations in the Cantos comprise some of the best known and hermeneutically rewarding sections of his poem: the ekphrastic sweep of Canto XLIX, the ‘Seven Lakes’ canto, and the recursions of natural phenomena in the... more
Pound’s pastoral meditations in the Cantos comprise some of the best known and hermeneutically rewarding sections of his poem: the ekphrastic sweep of Canto XLIX, the ‘Seven Lakes’ canto, and the recursions of natural phenomena in the Pisan Cantos foremost among them. Scholars have established how these moments of apparent quietism are instead deeply implicated in the political contexts of the canto sequences in which they occur. Pound deploys the pastoral genre to great effect at these strategic points in his poem: it demarcates the pendular movement between center and periphery that shapes Pound’s poetic subjectivity throughout his career. Pound also invokes figures central to his paradisal vision at these points in the Cantos: figures such as John Scottus Eriugena who demand recuperation from unjust marginalization in intellectual history, or Confucius, whose mediation of ideological action and contemplation is a model for the poet (not to mention Pound’s elegiac commemoration of Mussolini at the outset of the Pisan sequence). The ideological potency of the pastoral mode is restorative and consolatory in other ways too. The proximity of Chinese themes allows Pound to draw upon the venerable tradition of rustication from the Imperial court: this tradition reaches back to ancient times but is codified poetically in the Tang Dynasty and in painting in the Song Dynasty. In this tradition, the scholar-courtier is exiled from the center of empire, and waits out a period of reflection or ‘fishing’ in the peripheral south, occupied with poetic meditation until recalled to the court. It is unlikely that Pound possessed schematic knowledge of this tradition, but it clearly functions as a potent cognate to his own political and social fortunes as they are refracted in his poetry. This paper will seek to demarcate how Pound’s pastoralism intersects with the formal features of the Chinese rustication genre, and how this is implicated in a poetics of consolation at pivotal points in the Cantos.
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Several of Samuel Beckett’s long-standing intellectual interests – Augustinian theology, Cartesian and Spinozan philosophy, modern psychology and psychoanalysis, to name a few – share a structural and ideational awareness in modes of... more
Several of Samuel Beckett’s long-standing intellectual interests – Augustinian theology, Cartesian and Spinozan philosophy, modern psychology and psychoanalysis, to name a few – share a structural and ideational awareness in modes of self-conception. The practice of self-conception is one thing, but the thinking through the idea of self-conception in these various fields adds significant complexity to their discursive aims. This paper aims to evaluate the ways in which self-conception is manifested in Beckett’s late prose work, Worstward Ho. This text can be seen as an investigation of what it means for a text to imagine itself in the process of its own creation. The rising and falling tides of creation and decreation with respect to narrative, character, semantics, and syntax demonstrate a kind of thinking through of the literary as it flickers in and out of being, all the time attempting to grasp its own contours and essence. The page functions as a kind of proxy mind, but one that can be visualised in two dimensions and thus folded back onto itself in a way that concepts of the mind may not. This problem of self-conception was what led Jacques Derrida to claim, in his Preface to Husserl’s Introduction to the Origins of Geometry, that phenomenology meets its blind spot in applying its practices to itself. Beckett’s text might be seen as a literary cognate to this problem in philosophy: the challenge being not so much to see around or beyond the literary equivalent of ‘first philosophy,’ but to see all the way into it. Does Worstward Ho manage this quasi-impossibility?
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European Modernism has been understood from the beginning as a broadly transnational event: writers, artists, composers, and choreographers gathered together in such capitals as London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and New York, collaborating... more
European Modernism has been understood from the beginning as a broadly transnational event: writers, artists, composers, and choreographers gathered together in such capitals as London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and New York, collaborating and dissenting across national, linguistic and artistic lines to produce a truly transcontinental movement (especially when considering American and Argentinian writers in Paris, for example). When understood from this conventional viewpoint, one of the more exotic threads of Modernist transnational poetics is found in Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese art, literature, and written language. His fascination with Chinese writing received significant scholarly attention from the mid-twentieth century, some of which was produced by Chinese native speakers and scholars trained in sinolinguistics. Pound’s early enthusiasms concerning Chinese were considered to be well-intentioned but naïve: he often worked from materials translated via Japanese into French or English, such as Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks which formed the basis for Pound’s famous 1915 volume of ‘Chinese’ poems, Cathay, and the collaborative essay, ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’ of 1919. Following the Second World War, Pound made a serious attempt to learn spoken Mandarin and to understand the composition of written Chinese, which is partially reflected in later instalments of his epic poem The Cantos. More recent scholarship has sought to disentangle Pound’s obvious sinolinguistic shortcomings from the ways in which he installs a translated Chinese aesthetic into his poetic practice: in other words, to see how a certain model of ‘China’ might be seen as a Modernist invention, but one which makes available the double (or triple) vision of translation for critical examination. In this sense, then, Pound’s Chinese word-signs might offer new ways of thinking about East-West transnationalism beyond the European Modernist zone of cultural production, especially with regard to Pound’s surprisingly positive reception amongst contemporary avant-garde poets in China.
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As a Modernist epic poem, Ezra Pound’s Cantos demonstrates an aspiration towards the encyclopaedic, ranging across political, literary and intellectual history, geography, philosophy, economics, and so on. Pound scholars have long exerted... more
As a Modernist epic poem, Ezra Pound’s Cantos demonstrates an aspiration towards the encyclopaedic, ranging across political, literary and intellectual history, geography, philosophy, economics, and so on. Pound scholars have long exerted considerable effort in tracking down sources and discerning intertextual references in his poem. The Cantos simulates the materiality of various literary forms on its surface – parliamentary speeches, Papal encyclicals, ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, imperial decrees, epistles, as well as numerous literary genres and an array of languages and scripts. In a sense the poem is a (selective) primer in historical bibliography. The ways in which it deploys its intertextual examples include partial or full citations, glosses, and annotations. These techniques are of particular significance in the context of Pound’s early medieval sources (John Scottus Eriugena, Pseudo-Dionysius, Martianus Capella), for it is in the shift from late classical textuality to early medieval and Carolingian textuality that many of these techniques became properly codified. The way late classical authors were absorbed in the Carolingian context is something that scholars such as Rosamond McKitterick, Bernard Bischoff and others have considered for decades, but the relevance to Pound and to other Modernists has been almost completely overlooked. The urge to encyclopaedism in particular is a direct point of connection between these phases of cultural activity, and is so prominent in both epochs that it's frankly astonishing that the link has yet to be drawn. My paper will attempt a schematic exploration of the way technologies of textuality in early medieval and Modernist epochs come together in Pound’s ‘poem containing history,’ with specific attention to such features as the physical distribution of text material within the codex, intellectual apparatus such as glosses and annotations, and the concept of encyclopaedism within each cultural-historical formation.
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This paper will take aim at two texts – Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and John Banville’s The Sea (2005) – each of which appears to neatly satisfy its formal narrative requirements and temporal implications but actually leaves... more
This paper will take aim at two texts – Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and John Banville’s The Sea (2005) – each of which appears to neatly satisfy its formal narrative requirements and temporal implications but actually leaves these radically unresolved. I will first read Woolf’s text along conventional schematic lines: Part One, ‘The Window,’ establishes the problems and demarcations of space; Part Two, ‘Time Passes,’ provides a nuanced narrative reflection on time, history, and the psychology of traumatic events; and Part Three, ‘The Lighthouse,’ resolves space and time in the completion of Lily’s painting and of the quest to reach the lighthouse by Mr Ramsay and his two youngest children. But does Woolf in fact resolve this family romance by aesthetic and formal means? Lily might finish her painting, and therefore establish her place in the Ramsay saga, but standing alongside her at this pivotal moment is the one inscrutable character left unresolved by everyone else, and especially by the presiding shade of Mrs Ramsay: Augustus Carmichael. He is a shaggy Poseidon, equally indifferent to fame as a poet as he is to the opinion of these overthinking mortals, and he (p)resides in mythic time, outside of and untouched by the historical time and psychological time governing the narrative and its characters. In this way he presents a fundamental challenge to an understanding of Woolf’s modernist experiment in this novel, whereby he opens up an aporia unplugged by any available experimental means. John Banville’s The Sea charts uncannily similar territory and topology: the second half of my paper will make a case for Banville’s emulation of Woolf’s aporetic and mythic Carmichael, doubled in the diabolic Grace children, Chloe and Myles. Banville has Max Morden recall a tragedy from childhood that allows him space to grieve his recently deceased wife, as well as to indulge his self-consciously pompous and digressive narrative compensations. But here too Banville leaves open the way for the ‘strange tide’ to sweep mythic indifference beneath the local urgencies of human affairs. Why these shaggy sea monsters? What exactly are we missing (or gaining) in not reeling them in?
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Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The Cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his... more
Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The Cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his poem to perform a paideutic function as a repository for important ideas and their often-precarious textual transmission, his project was also aimed at the poetic representation of a paradiso terrestre, an ideal state of intellectual community at the end of history. Consequently, in a critical phase during the 1930s he was drawn to models of theological and political eschatology, not least those of the Confucian cosmos and Italian Fascism. This intensified interest was to have drastic consequences: Pound was arrested on charges of treason as detained in the US Army Detention Training Center outside of Pisa for his radio broadcasts during World War Two in Italy. During his incarceration Pound wrote much of The Pisan Cantos, in which pastoral observation is combined with political vituperation and nostalgic reminiscence. Pound also makes sustained reference to Johannes Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Hibernian-Carolingian theologian and poet who was condemned on account of disseminating heretical doctrines during his lifetime and then posthumously in the Averroist condemnations at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century.
Eriugena serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. In particular, Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae, provides Pound with a totalising account of history in its exegetical model of the reditus (the return of creation to the godhead), an eschatology to accompany Pound’s other preferred model in the paradiso terrestre. Although there is minimal critical scholarship on Eriugena’s significance in Pound’s prose and poetry, this Carolingian thinker plays a crucial part in Pound’s development of an anti-Aquinian view of medieval theology, part of an obscured tradition that is in itself millennial, and which serves to overturn what Pound saw as conventional, retrograde religious and social eschatologies. Eriugena’s significance is evident in critical passages of The Cantos – particularly Canto 36, the ‘Donna mi prega’ canto, and The Pisan Cantos – as well as in Pound’s prose. Pound also drew up extensive notes for a book on Eriugena, to form a trilogy with his books on the Ta Hio or Great Learning and Mencius, but which never eventuated in publication. These notes throw additional light onto the crucial role Eriugena plays for Pound in his vision for the paradisal poet who speaks for and from the end of days.
Eriugena serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. In particular, Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae, provides Pound with a totalising account of history in its exegetical model of the reditus (the return of creation to the godhead), an eschatology to accompany Pound’s other preferred model in the paradiso terrestre. Although there is minimal critical scholarship on Eriugena’s significance in Pound’s prose and poetry, this Carolingian thinker plays a crucial part in Pound’s development of an anti-Aquinian view of medieval theology, part of an obscured tradition that is in itself millennial, and which serves to overturn what Pound saw as conventional, retrograde religious and social eschatologies. Eriugena’s significance is evident in critical passages of The Cantos – particularly Canto 36, the ‘Donna mi prega’ canto, and The Pisan Cantos – as well as in Pound’s prose. Pound also drew up extensive notes for a book on Eriugena, to form a trilogy with his books on the Ta Hio or Great Learning and Mencius, but which never eventuated in publication. These notes throw additional light onto the crucial role Eriugena plays for Pound in his vision for the paradisal poet who speaks for and from the end of days.
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The influence of medieval literature and thought on Anglophone High Modernism is well known: the Aquinian strain in James Joyce’s novels; the influence of Troubadour lyric on the poetics of HD and Ezra Pound; and Dante’s long shadow cast... more
The influence of medieval literature and thought on Anglophone High Modernism is well known: the Aquinian strain in James Joyce’s novels; the influence of Troubadour lyric on the poetics of HD and Ezra Pound; and Dante’s long shadow cast over the entire movement, to name just three examples. Looking beyond these august examples, there remains a surprisingly rich network of medeival influences upon the modernist literary scene yet to be fully explored. One such example is the role of early medieval philosophy and theology on the poetics of Ezra Pound, not least the work of the Irish Carolingian thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, and his late classical (Martianus Capella, Boethius) and Eastern Christian (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa) sources. Pound absorbed much of this recondite knowledge intuitively, without consulting many of the source texts, a good number of which were simply not available to him during the height of his interests in the 1930s and early 1940s. In reading whatever was available to him, Pound also absorbed several facets of early medieval textual culture, and these are clearly visible in his poetry and prose. Eriugena developed the discipline of the line-by-line glossatory schema, and the production of florilegia and annotative systems flourished within his intellectual circles in the Carolingian Palatine and Cathedral Schools. Pound adapted his interests in classical textual forms and their modern legacies – the papyrus fragment, classical texts with precarious stemmatic histories (Stesichorus, Apollonius of Tyana) – to this changing textual world in Western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries. The text of The Cantos is significantly altered in its physical layout during this period of intensive reading and research in early medieval textuality. Pound even produces cantos on unrelated historical subjects – the life of John Adams, the dynastic history of China – that mimic and emulate these earlier transformations in textual culture, and perform these textual histories on the text’s surface.
This relation between the medieval manuscript and the modernist codex (printed, bound and published by another set of technologies and conventions altogether) provides a fruitful challenge when contemplating the notion of digital representation of Pound’s texts and their own sources. My recent work on Pound’s manuscript notes on Eriugena resulted in a print edition of these notes, extensively annotated and accompanied by critical commentary. Such material could plausibly be digitised, and this may be a desirable notion for conventional reasons: to provide clarity to deeply enmeshed texts and their sources; to trace out links from heavily fragmented and abbreviated notes to significant and extensive source material; and to accept the opportunity to compare the author’s notes with the actaul sources available to him, as well as to updated and/or more accurate editions of medieval texts. But what might such a digital edition tell us about the intellectual relations between modernist authorship and early medieval scribal cultures? How might digital forms of these modernist frays into the medieval take advantage of the well-known sympathies between medieval and digital textual cultures, and what differences might be wrought in having modernist textual intermediaries?
This relation between the medieval manuscript and the modernist codex (printed, bound and published by another set of technologies and conventions altogether) provides a fruitful challenge when contemplating the notion of digital representation of Pound’s texts and their own sources. My recent work on Pound’s manuscript notes on Eriugena resulted in a print edition of these notes, extensively annotated and accompanied by critical commentary. Such material could plausibly be digitised, and this may be a desirable notion for conventional reasons: to provide clarity to deeply enmeshed texts and their sources; to trace out links from heavily fragmented and abbreviated notes to significant and extensive source material; and to accept the opportunity to compare the author’s notes with the actaul sources available to him, as well as to updated and/or more accurate editions of medieval texts. But what might such a digital edition tell us about the intellectual relations between modernist authorship and early medieval scribal cultures? How might digital forms of these modernist frays into the medieval take advantage of the well-known sympathies between medieval and digital textual cultures, and what differences might be wrought in having modernist textual intermediaries?
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The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as... more
The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as precursors to Dante’s great elder contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti. Pound placed sufficient stock in Guido’s shaping role in the European poetic tradition that he undertook to publish a deluxe edition of the Rime, complete with photographic plates of manuscripts on vellum, putting more than one press out of business in the process. It was not only poetry that drove this fixation for Pound, but a conviction that medieval poets kept alight a flame of Gnostic wisdom counter to the predominating currents of Thomistic inflections of Aristotle. He saw in Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel the preservation of light philosophy reaching back beyond Grosseteste and Eriugena to the Presocratics and the early Neoplatonists. A tenuous but pivotal part of this hidden heritage resided in the Arabic transmission of classical texts, as well as major commentaries, especially those of Avicenna and Averroes on Aristotle’s De Anima. Scholars such as Peter Liebregts and Peter Makin have done admirable work in identifying and annotating the various citations and suggestive hints of this tradition throughout Pound’s poetry and prose. This paper seeks to establish wider aesthetic and strategic contexts for Pound’s use of medieval Arabic light philosophy: what purpose did this heritage serve for the poet who urged his peers to Make It New? How does it inflect his poetics, and how does it intersect with his personal and professional circumstances at particular points in his career? This attempt to give a broader picture to Pound’s very particular medievalism aims to give perspective on Modernist poetics, shaped in significant part by his influence.
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This paper seeks to examine the changing role of China in American literature from the mid-nineteenth century. Among the New England Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson showed a sustained interest in Chinese culture: his forays into... more
This paper seeks to examine the changing role of China in American literature from the mid-nineteenth century. Among the New England Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson showed a sustained interest in Chinese culture: his forays into Confucian thought extended to attempts to translate the Four Books, and his own theories of language and poetry were shaped by his understanding of Chinese writing. Emerson’s focus can be situated within a broadly Transatlantic Romantic interest in China, building on earlier work by such figures of the Enlightenment as Leibnitz, Athanasius Kircher, Voltaire and others. But what of the Emersonian legacy? The most prominent American Modernist to take a sustained interest in China was the poet Ezra Pound, who not only sought to learn to read Chinese, but assayed translations of the Four Books, utilised Chinese writing and concepts in his poetry, and dedicated an entire suite of his Cantos – the so-called ‘China Cantos’ – to a poetic history of Imperial China, composed as a transliterated digest of the thirteen volumes of de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de la Chine (1775-85). Pound’s knowledge of Chinese history and culture was also influenced by another inheritor of the Emersonian vision: the economist and Japanese art historian Ernest Fenollosa. I aim to trace out the implications of this complex history of American Sinopoetics as one inflected by other languages (Japanese, French), wildly varying competencies in Chinese written and spoken language, and matters of international diplomacy and philosophical disposition. By bringing Emerson and Pound into a single discursive frame, my hope is to clarify how American literary impressions of China may have transformed from the mid-nineteenth century, and to discern what concepts and themes endured.
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As a subset of modernist digital editions, the digital manuscript brings a number of specific issues into sharp focus: what is gained, and lost, by reading and studying a digital manuscript as opposed to codex facsimiles, or even... more
As a subset of modernist digital editions, the digital manuscript brings a number of specific issues into sharp focus: what is gained, and lost, by reading and studying a digital manuscript as opposed to codex facsimiles, or even consulting the original documents housed within the literary archive? What kind of effect does digitisation have on the perceived aura of an artwork, and artist, and our understanding of the role of authorship and authority? How do these issues intersect with recent discourses of materialist modernism, book history, curation, as well as the conceptual triangulation of work, text and document? This paper will seek to open up some of these questions, beginning with a critical examination of the digital manuscript edition-in-progress of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, and moving out into other cognate examples in digital textual scholarship and in modernist manuscript studies more generally.
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This paper seeks to reappraise the critical role in Pound’s poetry and thought played by the ninth-century Hiberno-Carolingian cleric, Johannes Scotus Eriugena. Pound deploys Eriugena’s Neoplatonic philosophy, supposed heresies, and Greek... more
This paper seeks to reappraise the critical role in Pound’s poetry and thought played by the ninth-century Hiberno-Carolingian cleric, Johannes Scotus Eriugena. Pound deploys Eriugena’s Neoplatonic philosophy, supposed heresies, and Greek learning at pivotal points in The Cantos – particularly in Canto 36, (largely) Pound’s translation of Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone, “Donna mi prega,” and in Canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos – as well as in such prose works as Guide to Kulchur. I propose to examine afresh the way Eriugena functions in Pound’s writing – both published works and manuscript materials – particularly the way he draws together themes and images from seemingly disparate traditions, some of which include: Arab transmission of Greek philosophy (especially commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima) in the post-classical period; Neoplatonism and light philosophy; and Troubadour lyric and the poetry of Cavalcanti as keepers of esoteric knowledge by way of imagery and vocabulary. Just as Eriugena’s writing mediates between centres and peripheries of knowledge and power (the Carolingian court, on one hand, and Neoplatonic eschatology, on the other), Pound’s strategic references to Eriugena provide alternate systems of reference across and between texts. These systems are deeply connected threads that draw apparently singular elements in The Cantos into a coherent, coordinated and critical fabric, providing Pound a space for contemplation and active engagement in cultural regeneration. Pound’s earlier engagements with Eriugena’s Periphyseon in particular centre upon the rich devotional topos of light as a vector of divine cosmology, striking a chord with Pound’s other preferred models for the paradiso terrestre in the 1930s and 40s: the Confucian system of ethics and metaphysics, and the Italian Fascist political order.
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Numerous canonical works of literary modernism have provided striking challenges to scholarly editorial methods, and comprise some of the more instructive case-studies for textual scholarship: the editorial history of James Joyce’s... more
Numerous canonical works of literary modernism have provided striking challenges to scholarly editorial methods, and comprise some of the more instructive case-studies for textual scholarship: the editorial history of James Joyce’s Ulysses is one prominent example, especially the fall-out of the Gabler Synoptic Edition of 1984 and the subsequent Kidd-Gabler “Joyce Wars.” A surprisingly large number of canonical modernist texts have yet to receive proper scholarly editorial treatment (e.g. Samuel Beckett), or else have yet to see rigorous scholarly editions fully absorbed into the disciplinary discourse (William Faulkner). The rapid expansion of the field of Literary Modernism in recent years provides other challenges, in dividing the finite energies of scholarly editors, as well as offering texts and documents not easily absorbed into conventional editorial practices (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Malcolm Lowry). This partial picture of Modernist textual scholarship suggests there are singular opportunities for innovative thinking on editorial theory and method, not least in relation to the potential (and potential limits) of digital editorial methods. As a way of anchoring these deeply imbricated issues, this paper asserts the following thesis: that specific Modernist texts assert basic challenges to conventions of scholarly editing in their material and conceptual embodiments, and in their processes of composition and publication. A small number of case studies will illustrate how such texts demand a rethinking of the objects of scholarly editing and the methods by which they might be realised in scholarly editions. By attending to the material challenges of such literary production – embodied in manuscripts, ancillary documents, audio and video recordings, published works, critical reception, digitally-mediated versions, etc. – the objects of textual scholarship can be reconceived and innovative approaches to the scholarly editing of such objects can be developed.
The task of rethinking the objects of Modernist scholarly editing can be grounded productively in the potential advantages of cross-disciplinary comparison. A prominent recent example, Paul Eggert’s Securing the Past (CUP, 2009), explores whether methods in cognate disciplines might help in developing sophisticated models for text editing. The techniques of architectural restoration and art conservation offer ways to think about text objects that bear considerable potential for development. Equally, there is potential to adapt philosophical discourses to textual scholarship generally, and to thinking about the status of the text-object in particular. Specific studies have attempted to schematise the concept of text by way of traditional philosophical analysis, such as Jorge Gracia’s A Theory of Textuality: The Logic and Epistemology (SUNY Press, 1995) and Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience (SUNY Press, 1996). The field of ontology and its subfield of mereology (the relation of parts and wholes) also offer potentially useful concepts for the description of text-objects, but as Kathrin Koslicki argues in her recent study, The Structure of Objects (OUP, 2008), the philosophical tendency to study parts in isolation from their articulation within wholes can limit the effectiveness of such analysis. On the other hand, philosophically supple models of part-whole relations (and even incomplete “wholes”) seem to provide fertile kinds of formal thinking about the materiality of texts and their archives.
How might these kinds of inquiry (and others such as phenomenology, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics) inflect textual scholarship in literary Modernism? Might they provide schemas by which the irregular and counter-intuitive composition of textual objects can be ordered into scholarly editions? Whilst there may be significant merit in developing concepts and theories of text, their utility and potency must be tested against the more intransigent and idiosyncratic materials. A text such as Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1946) – composed in a United States Army Detention Centre during wartime, without the aid of a working library or usual networks of sociality and intellectual exchange – presents basic challenges to notions of teleological development from draft to published text. Specific features of the published text, such as the musical score that comprises most of Canto LXXV, functions as an arresting visual object within the poem, but embodies intensive problems of semantic function and textual “presence.” Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (1953), also composed during the Second World War, presents other basic challenges to an understanding of literary composition and transmission. The radical unevenness of its published versions, and the manifold puzzles and aporias they display, recursively point back to manuscript drafts, in a curious inversion of conventional models of text evolution. These materials pose specific challenges of organization, a challenge taken up in the international Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (the author is currently editing the module dedicated to the Watt materials). In addition to such canonical Modernist texts, other cases such as Robert Walser’s Mikrogramme 1924-1933 [Microscripts] (2003) or Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumously published note-box “novel,” The Original of Laura (2009), demonstrate various fractures in the understanding of the text object. The questions these texts (and others) ask of scholarly editors oblige reconsideration of textual scholarship and requisite models for the adequate treatment of Modernist texts, experimental or otherwise: texts as intellectual or conceptual objects, the imbrications of published texts and their material archives, and of course the multivalent issues tied up in digitized texts, manuscripts and scholarly editions.
The task of rethinking the objects of Modernist scholarly editing can be grounded productively in the potential advantages of cross-disciplinary comparison. A prominent recent example, Paul Eggert’s Securing the Past (CUP, 2009), explores whether methods in cognate disciplines might help in developing sophisticated models for text editing. The techniques of architectural restoration and art conservation offer ways to think about text objects that bear considerable potential for development. Equally, there is potential to adapt philosophical discourses to textual scholarship generally, and to thinking about the status of the text-object in particular. Specific studies have attempted to schematise the concept of text by way of traditional philosophical analysis, such as Jorge Gracia’s A Theory of Textuality: The Logic and Epistemology (SUNY Press, 1995) and Texts: Ontological Status, Identity, Author, Audience (SUNY Press, 1996). The field of ontology and its subfield of mereology (the relation of parts and wholes) also offer potentially useful concepts for the description of text-objects, but as Kathrin Koslicki argues in her recent study, The Structure of Objects (OUP, 2008), the philosophical tendency to study parts in isolation from their articulation within wholes can limit the effectiveness of such analysis. On the other hand, philosophically supple models of part-whole relations (and even incomplete “wholes”) seem to provide fertile kinds of formal thinking about the materiality of texts and their archives.
How might these kinds of inquiry (and others such as phenomenology, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics) inflect textual scholarship in literary Modernism? Might they provide schemas by which the irregular and counter-intuitive composition of textual objects can be ordered into scholarly editions? Whilst there may be significant merit in developing concepts and theories of text, their utility and potency must be tested against the more intransigent and idiosyncratic materials. A text such as Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1946) – composed in a United States Army Detention Centre during wartime, without the aid of a working library or usual networks of sociality and intellectual exchange – presents basic challenges to notions of teleological development from draft to published text. Specific features of the published text, such as the musical score that comprises most of Canto LXXV, functions as an arresting visual object within the poem, but embodies intensive problems of semantic function and textual “presence.” Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (1953), also composed during the Second World War, presents other basic challenges to an understanding of literary composition and transmission. The radical unevenness of its published versions, and the manifold puzzles and aporias they display, recursively point back to manuscript drafts, in a curious inversion of conventional models of text evolution. These materials pose specific challenges of organization, a challenge taken up in the international Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (the author is currently editing the module dedicated to the Watt materials). In addition to such canonical Modernist texts, other cases such as Robert Walser’s Mikrogramme 1924-1933 [Microscripts] (2003) or Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumously published note-box “novel,” The Original of Laura (2009), demonstrate various fractures in the understanding of the text object. The questions these texts (and others) ask of scholarly editors oblige reconsideration of textual scholarship and requisite models for the adequate treatment of Modernist texts, experimental or otherwise: texts as intellectual or conceptual objects, the imbrications of published texts and their material archives, and of course the multivalent issues tied up in digitized texts, manuscripts and scholarly editions.
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This paper adapts David Wills’s concept of dorsality – a trope for the way the technological (τέχνη) inheres in the human (βίος) – to demonstrate how textual genetics and the grey canon inhere in certain modes of theoretical reflection on... more
This paper adapts David Wills’s concept of dorsality – a trope for the way the technological (τέχνη) inheres in the human (βίος) – to demonstrate how textual genetics and the grey canon inhere in certain modes of theoretical reflection on (and in) Beckett’s work, and vice versa. A close reading of the Trilogy will focus upon the ways in which narrators’ quests are radically conditioned by the unseen or oblique, where progress in staked upon what is at one’s back, in ‘actual’ space and time and in analogous dimensions of written composition. I hope to show through this mode of reading how theory and archive are fundamentally imbricated: not only in critical appraisals of Beckett’s compositional practices, or in ‘theories of the archive’ as they arise in Beckett Studies, but in how they describe one and the same thing in Beckett’s writing practices, most luminously in Beckett’s postwar novels. Processes of composition are sedimented into these novels in various ways: in the hesitations, retractions and contradictions of narrators, and in their uneasy, contingent sense of agency and identity. These rifts and fissures in narrative agency are aroused and exacerbated by narrators’ acute awareness of their predecessors and contemporaries across Beckett’s oeuvre, and the threats they pose to each other. Several of the fundamental questions at hand – the priority of narrative identity, the recension and redaction of written testimony, the morphology of narrative and its implications for hermeneutics – are in equal parts informed by philology and theory. Indeed they articulate ways in which the classical fields of criticism and interpretation, once united but long bifurcated, might function productively (after Dirk van Hulle) in a zone of textual awareness.
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Johannes Eriugena, the ninth-century theologian and poet, serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. In particular, Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De... more
Johannes Eriugena, the ninth-century theologian and poet, serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. In particular, Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae, provides Pound with a totalising account of history in its exegetical model of the reditus (the return of creation to the godhead), an eschatology which accompanies Pound’s other preferred models for a paradiso terrestre: the Confucian world order and Italian Fascism. Although there is minimal critical scholarship on Eriugena’s significance in Pound’s prose and poetry, this Carolingian thinker plays a crucial part in Pound’s development of an anti-Aquinian view of medieval theology, part of an obscured tradition that is in itself millennial, and which serves to overturn what Pound saw as conventional, retrograde religious and social eschatologies. Eriugena’s significance is evident in critical passages of the Cantos – particularly Canto 36, the ‘Donna mi prega’ canto, and the Pisan Cantos – as well as in Pound’s prose. Pound also drew up extensive notes for a book on Eriugena, to form a trilogy with his books on the Ta Hio and Mencius, but which never eventuated in publication. These notes throw additional light onto the crucial role Eriugena plays for Pound in his vision for the paradisal poet who speaks for and from the end of days.
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Among the experimental literary works of Modernism, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt bears a singular reputation for its complex, fragmented narrative structure: its many footnotes, musical scores, “manuscript” perforations, and extended... more
Among the experimental literary works of Modernism, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel Watt bears a singular reputation for its complex, fragmented narrative structure: its many footnotes, musical scores, “manuscript” perforations, and extended prose sequences of combinatorial logic, give it emblematic status as an avant-garde challenge to literary convention. This status is endowed further when the novel’s very extensive manuscript archive is taken into account. This repository comprises nearly a thousand pages of drafts, revisions, and substantial narrative divergences from the published text. The manuscripts are famous in their own right as aesthetic objects, but very few scholars have read or studied them at any length, preliminary to any attempt to measure their evolution against published editions of the novel. The logic of a digital edition of this complex manuscript material seems clear: to provide clear ways of mapping the network of confluences and divergences between manuscript and published text, as a first, critical step towards exploring their semantic and hermeneutic implications. Current work on a digital edition of the Watt manuscripts forms part of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project – a large, international project that aims to digitize all of Beckett’s literary manuscripts – and already suggests new modes of viewing the novel’s narrative, as well as new insights into Modernist narrative experimentation more generally. The complex and often very subtle relationships between elements of the manuscript text – many of which do not appear in full or at all in the published text – are eminently conducive to digital display. This in turn provides the careful reader with a more precisely calibrated appreciation for the reticulated networks of reference, association, and narrative lines in the manuscript material, and the implications of their recycled, revised or omitted status in the published text. Such a digital remediation of archival documents provides benefits beyond the practical reach of print-based editions: the ability to visualize complex networks of citation and association across a large manuscript, including multiple page views, as well as various methods by which to quantify, collate and interpret highly imbricated narrative material. In turn, a comprehensive digital presentation of an iconic Modernist manuscript comprises a powerful argument for strategic digital interventions in traditional humanities scholarship. This essay will explore several critical insights arising from this digital edition, and the mutual implications for literary studies and for digital humanities.
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The representation of affect in Samuel Beckett’s work is both complex and understated. This is partly due to the subtleties of Beckett’s style and modes of allusion (and specifically the indirect, submerged nature of literary reference),... more
The representation of affect in Samuel Beckett’s work is both complex and understated. This is partly due to the subtleties of Beckett’s style and modes of allusion (and specifically the indirect, submerged nature of literary reference), but is also driven by the kinds of affect at issue in a particular text or play. The profound influence of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy on Beckett’s early work is well known, and the central roles of Presocratic philosophy and medieval theology in his work has come into sharper focus in recent scholarship. Today I want to trace out precisely how and why particular sources are used to construct a discourse of affect in Beckett’s work, and specifically a discourse in which affect is sublimated, occluded, or obliquely hinted at, never fully in the frame. I take his 1953 novel Watt as a strategic example, a dying ember of Modernism’s fire. This text resides at a critical juncture in Beckett’s biography and aesthetic development: composed during the Second World War in circumstances of deep estrangement, at a time when Beckett had resolved to make French his language of literary composition, its troubled journey into print embodies dispersed subjectivity in the most acute sense. The evolution of this text provides the grounds for this “vaguening” of affect, suiting Beckett’s aesthetic purposes, especially with respect to the philosophical and theological discourses in the novel. This pivotal text sets out the ground for the representation and reportage of (minimal, minimised) affect in Beckett’s subsequent, more famous novels and plays.
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From his youthful orientalism, Pound’s proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation /... more
From his youthful orientalism, Pound’s proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation / adaptation from the Chinese as early as 1915 in Cathay, but later attention to Chinese history and aesthetics in the China Cantos (first published in 1940), demonstrates a concerted effort to absorb and conceptualise a Chinese aesthetic. For Pound, this aesthetic would reside fundamentally at the juncture between word and image – the “ideogrammic method” attempted a word-image synthesis in the poetic image – shown most vividly in the “Seven Lakes” canto that immediately precedes the China Cantos in his epic poem The Cantos. This short lyric piece was inspired by, and performs a dialogue with, the Sho-Sho Hakkei tekagami in Pound’s possession. This (Japanese) illustrated album of calligraphy provides the poet with the means to pass beyond occidental traditions of ekphrasis and to imagine a transmediatic sensibility, in which word and image perform mutually constituting functions that avowedly depart (for Pound) from Western conventions of the time.
This paper will explore the ways in which the “Seven Lakes” canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and will assess the context of this poem within Pound’s own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound’s mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.
This paper will explore the ways in which the “Seven Lakes” canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and will assess the context of this poem within Pound’s own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound’s mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.
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William Faulkner’s lectures, readings and Q&A sessions with students whilst writer in residence at the University of Virginia in the 1950s offer scholars invaluable resources in contextualizing his literary work, and in divining a sense... more
William Faulkner’s lectures, readings and Q&A sessions with students whilst writer in residence at the University of Virginia in the 1950s offer scholars invaluable resources in contextualizing his literary work, and in divining a sense of Faulkner’s appraisal of his work. These materials, recorded on reel-to-reel tapes and house in the UVa Library’s Special Collections, were released in digital form last year to much fanfare: the digitization project editor, Stephen Railton, has attracted just praise for this major step in realising the potential value of such primary material to Faulkner Studies. In the context of such potential scholarly wealth, this paper seeks to focus on a specific part of the Faulkner digital archive – his public readings of literary works – as a fulcrum with which to examine the effects of literary remediation. Faulkner reads his own written, published words (leaving aside the ways in which they may have come into being during the composition process), and provides his characters and narrators with the immediacy and presence of oral articulation: the kind of immediacy and presence we are trained to imagine when reading written dialogue and narrative reportage. Their words are thus doubly mediated: first by the written word and then by the voice of Faulkner (ironically the inner voice in which they may have first come into being). This kind of mediation is all perfectly familiar, domesticated by our ways of reading and thinking about narration. Yet this process of narrative mediation pre-empts the remediation of Faulkner’s own reading events: from his own direct oral delivery (itself prompted by a published text), to audio recording (and potential broadcasting), analogue transcription, and finally to the digitization of these recordings and transcriptions. What are the implications of such remediations? How do they change the substance and status and authority of Faulkner’s words, his characters’ and narrators’ words, and the texts in which they occur? Does this process of digitization – and critically, the storage and transmission of the results of digitization – realise a more comprehensive notion of text, or does it create something strictly extraneous to the text? Does this disperse Faulkner’s work across media, or does it network his texts in fundamental ways within a Modernist media ecology?
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The bicycle is the preeminent vehicle of the modernist literary avant-garde. From Alfred Jarry’s apotheosis of masculinity, the 10 000km race in The Supermale (1902), to Moran’s loss of wheels––literal and figurative––in Samuel Beckett’s... more
The bicycle is the preeminent vehicle of the modernist literary avant-garde. From Alfred Jarry’s apotheosis of masculinity, the 10 000km race in The Supermale (1902), to Moran’s loss of wheels––literal and figurative––in Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy (1951), the bicycle is ritually coupled with male characters and serves as an acute marker of their identities. As a means of self-propelled locomotion, the bicycle is also an expression of existential and ideological agency: neatly expressed in Hugh Kenner’s formula for Beckett’s cyclist, the Cartesian Centaur. The bicycle is also a mode of protest against and liberation from ever-encroaching automation by way of rail and road: known in earlier times as the velocipede––literally “fast foot”––this mercurial device provides a means of protest in its locomotory self-reliance. The literal and figurative power of the bicycle as vehicle of the avant-garde reaches its still point – ever turning – in Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman, composed in 1940 but first published only in 1967. This compendium of the Varieties of Velocipedal Experience ranges from the instrumental use of the bicycle pump as weapon, the Gnostic mystery of missing lanterns, the ontologically hybrid man-becoming-bicycle, and the mounted cycle as apotheosis of erotic desire charading as a corpuscular cosmology. How do O’Brien’s bicycles inflect the rich discourse of modernist wheelmen? How do they enable or prohibit their riders’ contemplative faculties? Do they embellish or subsume their riders’ identities? What does it mean to push a bike, to take it on a train? How does it compare to walking?
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The American poet Ezra Pound played a crucial role in establishing a deeper understanding of East Asian art and literature in the Anglophone sphere in the earlier twentieth century. Pound's contribution, especially in his translation of... more
The American poet Ezra Pound played a crucial role in establishing a deeper understanding of East Asian art and literature in the Anglophone sphere in the earlier twentieth century. Pound's contribution, especially in his translation of Chinese poetry, has long been recognised – T. S. Eliot wrote as early as 1928 that Pound was "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." Scholars have been careful to qualify Pound's orientalism, and rightly show caution regarding his more strident claims for and uses of Chinese materials. Initially Pound followed the linguistically naive views of Ernest Fenollosa on matters of Chinese language – using Fenollosa's notebooks as a basis for his 1915 volume Cathay and for the 1919 essay, "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," which provided the basis for a theory of the poetic image along "ideogrammic" lines.
Over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study, Pound's proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation / adaptation from the Chinese as early as 1915 in Cathay, but later attention to Chinese history and aesthetics in the China Cantos (first published in 1940) demonstrates a concerted effort to absorb and conceptualise a Chinese aesthetic. For Pound, this aesthetic would reside fundamentally at the juncture between word and image – the "ideogrammic method" attempted a word-image synthesis in the poetic image – shown most vividly in the "Seven Lakes" canto that immediately precedes the China Cantos in his epic sequence. This short lyric piece was inspired by, and performs a dialogue with, the Sho-Sho Hakkei tekagami in Pound's possession. This (Japanese) illustrated album of calligraphy provides the poet with the means to pass beyond occidental traditions of ekphrasis and to imagine a transmediatic sensibility, in which word and image perform mutually constituting functions that avowedly depart (for Pound) from Western conventions of the time.
This paper will explore the ways in which the "Seven Lakes" canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and will assess the context of this poem within Pound's own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound's mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.
Over a lifetime of literary and linguistic study, Pound's proficiency in and appreciation of Chinese language deepened rather considerably. He was aware of the pitfalls and potentialities of translation / adaptation from the Chinese as early as 1915 in Cathay, but later attention to Chinese history and aesthetics in the China Cantos (first published in 1940) demonstrates a concerted effort to absorb and conceptualise a Chinese aesthetic. For Pound, this aesthetic would reside fundamentally at the juncture between word and image – the "ideogrammic method" attempted a word-image synthesis in the poetic image – shown most vividly in the "Seven Lakes" canto that immediately precedes the China Cantos in his epic sequence. This short lyric piece was inspired by, and performs a dialogue with, the Sho-Sho Hakkei tekagami in Pound's possession. This (Japanese) illustrated album of calligraphy provides the poet with the means to pass beyond occidental traditions of ekphrasis and to imagine a transmediatic sensibility, in which word and image perform mutually constituting functions that avowedly depart (for Pound) from Western conventions of the time.
This paper will explore the ways in which the "Seven Lakes" canto attempts such a revolutionary gesture, and will assess the context of this poem within Pound's own aesthetic development, and within his evolving orientalist sensibility. It is my contention that the success of the poem (and by implication, Pound's mature orientalist aesthetic) stands or falls on the strength of its synthesis of word and image: and more specifically, the relation of words and images from Chinese and Japanese contexts, on the one hand, and Western and Anglophone contexts on the other. It is this east-west nexus in the word-image dialectic that affords Pound such a poetic opportunity, the implications of which have resounded in Anglophone and particularly American poetry since.
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A recurring dialectic is established at numerous critical points in Pound’s poetry and prose: between a centre of power and a perceived hostile threat. This structure commonly occurs when Pound is dealing with historical material,... more
A recurring dialectic is established at numerous critical points in Pound’s poetry and prose: between a centre of power and a perceived hostile threat. This structure commonly occurs when Pound is dealing with historical material, especially in the Cantos: Imperial China and the barbarian threat of “Buddhist” Mongols; the crumbling Roman Empire of Justinian and the military and economic threat of Abdl Malik in the eastern Mediterranean; and even the threat posed by the engineers of war in Pound’s lifetime, mobilising conflict for perceived financial gain at the cost of civilisation and humanity. What does this recurring structure tell us about Pound’s thinking more generally? Is it a necessary or otherwise desirable mechanism by which to legitimise centralised power, especially when that power is Pound’s subject in poetry or prose (such as the China Cantos)? How might this mechanism of centre and periphery be resolved with Pound’s earlier expression of opposition to authority in the Vorticist / Blast era, in the cultural centre of London? Or indeed his valorisation of the Na-Khi late in his poetic career? This paper will explore some examples of this mechanism in the prose and poetry, to establish the kind and strength of any emergent pattern, and to evaluate its significance more generally for Pound’s thought.
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Today I will reflect upon one part of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, namely the digital transcription of the 1953 novel Watt. This novel is one of Beckett’s more opaque and challenging texts, but as a major text it remains... more
Today I will reflect upon one part of the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, namely the digital transcription of the 1953 novel Watt. This novel is one of Beckett’s more opaque and challenging texts, but as a major text it remains visibly under-represented in the scholarship. My initial work on this novel attempted to locate the reasons for its textual opacity, which, of course, was very much implicated in its complex manuscript provenance: the very troubled composition of the manuscript notebooks during WWII and the belated publication of the text in 1953. The need for a coherent manuscript transcription becomes obvious, as a way of giving a context for – if not necessarily an answer to – the many riddles, non-sequiturs, dangling references and narrative digressions in the published text. Today is not the time for a full-scale demonstration of the transcription, but I think there is an opportunity to evaluate some of the practical outcomes of the project, and to explore some of its basic challenges. These challenges compel questions on the nature and structure of Beckett’s literary manuscripts and texts, the role of editorial methods, and the ways in which digital innovation can add to the scholarly understanding of texts.
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Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is uniquely positioned in his oeuvre: composed in exile in 1941-45 and first published in 1953, it forecasts the transition from English to French as his preferred language of composition, and signifies a shift... more
Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is uniquely positioned in his oeuvre: composed in exile in 1941-45 and first published in 1953, it forecasts the transition from English to French as his preferred language of composition, and signifies a shift from the expansive comic mode of the early Beckett so influenced by Joyce to the linguistically austere and ontologically-minded later Beckett. The precarious mode of the text’s composition also sees a profound meditation on the purpose and structure of literary expression, abundantly evident in the six manuscript notebooks and partial typescript. This work engages with a profound rethinking of narrative, discarding any sense of compositional telos from drafts to finished, published work. Instead, a reticulated, imbricated series of narrative episodes trace paths across the surface of the published text, and deep into the archive. By force of circumstance and by force of will, Beckett thought his compositional practices into a radical zone of narrative deformation that was to have a lasting effect on his writing, and upon literary aesthetics in the latter half of the twentieth century.
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Today I would like to gloss my project – the digital manuscript transcription of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, Watt. This project addresses a number of issues in Beckett Studies and perhaps more generally in Modernist Literary Studies, but... more
Today I would like to gloss my project – the digital manuscript transcription of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, Watt. This project addresses a number of issues in Beckett Studies and perhaps more generally in Modernist Literary Studies, but at the same time it raises a number of questions concerning text status and the identity of the literary object. The most obvious rationale for a digital manuscript of a notoriously knotty text is that of accessibility: to render a lengthy and complex manuscript both legible and searchable (or at least its transcription), and to open it to wider access by means of its digital form. These are admirable goals, but they prompt the question: why this manuscript of this text? How does it justify the labour, resources, and skill acquisition required to realise it digitally?
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This paper will demonstrate an advanced work in progress, the digitised manuscript and transcription of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (composed in 1941-45 and first published in 1953). Discussion of the project will centre upon the digital... more
This paper will demonstrate an advanced work in progress, the digitised manuscript and transcription of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (composed in 1941-45 and first published in 1953). Discussion of the project will centre upon the digital resources buttressing the presentation of manuscript material and a range of related analytic features, and will outline some of the more significant ways in which specifically digital treatment of the material opens up new lines of literary and textual analysis. Indeed, some foundational concepts of textuality come into sharp focus by virtue of digital treatment of textual materials. Some of these concerns will be illustrated by way of examples taken from the Watt project, and by a fuller view of the complex relationship between text and manuscript arising from the project.
I’ve used that tricky word “promise” in my moderately disingenuous title because it provides a sharp focus for the kinds of issues I think we need to keep clearest when contemplating digital scholarly work in modernist literary studies.... more
I’ve used that tricky word “promise” in my moderately disingenuous title because it provides a sharp focus for the kinds of issues I think we need to keep clearest when contemplating digital scholarly work in modernist literary studies. This word arises rather frequently in discussions on digital scholarship, which is perhaps not surprising when one considers the complex state of the field: a field that bears exciting potential, is at present only partially mapped, and brings more or less exotic skills to the more traditional matters of textual scholarship. Indeed, Jerome McGann and Dino Buzzatti make precisely this point in the opening sentences of their essay, “Electronic Textual Editing: Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon”:
Just as the machinery of the codex opened radically new ways to store, organize, study, transform, and disseminate knowledge and information, digital technology represents an epochal watershed for anyone involved with semiotic materials. For scholars of books and texts, and in particular for editorial scholars, digital tools have already begun their disciplinary transformations, and we can see as well the promise of further, perhaps even more remarkable, changes on the near horizon of our work.
The tone is one of cautious optimism, yet the perceived implications for epochal change in the digital age are plainly audible. It’s worth pausing at this point to ask a few questions: What exactly is the promise of digital scholarly editing, especially in the context of modernist textuality? What can scholars and students reasonably expect from digital editions of modernist works? What kinds of responsible promises or claims might scholars make for their digital projects? (Keeping in mind that if you promise the world, you should expect to take roughly an aeon to deliver it.)
Just as the machinery of the codex opened radically new ways to store, organize, study, transform, and disseminate knowledge and information, digital technology represents an epochal watershed for anyone involved with semiotic materials. For scholars of books and texts, and in particular for editorial scholars, digital tools have already begun their disciplinary transformations, and we can see as well the promise of further, perhaps even more remarkable, changes on the near horizon of our work.
The tone is one of cautious optimism, yet the perceived implications for epochal change in the digital age are plainly audible. It’s worth pausing at this point to ask a few questions: What exactly is the promise of digital scholarly editing, especially in the context of modernist textuality? What can scholars and students reasonably expect from digital editions of modernist works? What kinds of responsible promises or claims might scholars make for their digital projects? (Keeping in mind that if you promise the world, you should expect to take roughly an aeon to deliver it.)
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The fields of textual studies and bibliography have undergone tremendous change in the last several decades, both in the formal and theoretical understanding of text, and in the application of editorial processes that lie beyond the... more
The fields of textual studies and bibliography have undergone tremendous change in the last several decades, both in the formal and theoretical understanding of text, and in the application of editorial processes that lie beyond the erstwhile Anglophone paradigm of copy text editing. Two prominent factors instrumental to this change are: the impact of greater theoretical reflection upon the methods of critical editing and specific research questions; and the profound intensification of the role of digital technology in structuring and processing research materials. In recent years scholars have addressed the impact of both of these factors on textual studies (rarely are they dealt with together, or potential relations between them explored). Now seems an opportune moment to examine exactly what kinds of rewards, and perils, might present themselves to textual critics at such a time in the history of textual scholarship. What are the potentialities opened up by genetic editing or social text editing? Which of the promises of editing in the digital domain – extravagant and otherwise – are worth pursuing? Is the notion of the complete text a mere daydream, or something tangible when theory, method and technological innovations converge?
This paper will outline some of the potentialities of contemporary thinking in textual criticism, and will seek to examine the validity of certain claims for textual completeness or superior methodological rigour. Beyond this, the notion of a general theory of text will be proposed and examined. The promise of such a theory is to be found in the convergence of textual criticism and hermeneutics in recent editorial theories and methods. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s ideal – where the establishment of a text and the interpretation of its substance are two parts of the same process – may have renewed purchase in an environment where editorial decisions are not assumed to be value-free or self-evident, and where any interpretive move is bound up in the presumed status of the text. Can textual studies move towards a general theory of text? Is such a thing desirable, or too grand a concept to act as anything but a distraction from the empirical realities of editing? How might digital editing practices inflect the question of a general theory of text?
This paper will outline some of the potentialities of contemporary thinking in textual criticism, and will seek to examine the validity of certain claims for textual completeness or superior methodological rigour. Beyond this, the notion of a general theory of text will be proposed and examined. The promise of such a theory is to be found in the convergence of textual criticism and hermeneutics in recent editorial theories and methods. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s ideal – where the establishment of a text and the interpretation of its substance are two parts of the same process – may have renewed purchase in an environment where editorial decisions are not assumed to be value-free or self-evident, and where any interpretive move is bound up in the presumed status of the text. Can textual studies move towards a general theory of text? Is such a thing desirable, or too grand a concept to act as anything but a distraction from the empirical realities of editing? How might digital editing practices inflect the question of a general theory of text?
A review essay of Brian Castro, Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria, A Novel in thirty-four cantos (Sydney: Giramondo, 2017), 232pp, $26.95 AU, ISBN 9781925336221.
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Review of The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham (London and New York: Penguin, 2014), 419 pp, ISBN: 9781594203367, in The Australian Book Review (March 2015): 34-35
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Review of Echo’s Bones, by Samuel Beckett, edited by Mark Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), xiii + 121 pp, ISBN: 9780571246380, in The Australian Book Review (November 2014): 56-57
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Review of Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013), 262pp., ISBN: 9781922182234, in The Conversation, 2 July <http://theconversation.com/a-girl-is-a-half-formed-thing-so-form-an-opinion-27687>
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My dissertation explores two literary texts produced in conditions of prolonged physical and psychological estrangement in the mid-twentieth century: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and Samuel Beckett's novel Watt. Both texts represent, in... more
My dissertation explores two literary texts produced in conditions of prolonged physical and psychological estrangement in the mid-twentieth century: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and Samuel Beckett's novel Watt. Both texts represent, in deeply challenging and pivotal ways, a sharp change in the modern conception of the literary text, and each has still to be fully absorbed into our understanding of modernist text production. The radical uncertainty that either text would survive to publication at all demonstrates the need for a model of textuality that accounts for profound dislocations from ordinary spheres of production. I propose an editorial method of “textual ontogeny” that gives critical emphasis to oblique elements of texts that otherwise appear to be ill-defined or incomplete: manuscript drafts and earlier episodes emerging as cryptic puzzles in the published text; and structural or accidental disruptions between the author and regular processes of publication. My dissertation shows that the choice of editorial procedure in publishing study-texts of such modernist works is not merely a knotty footnote to the history of textual method. Rather it responds to new kinds of textuality that will surely require radically new kinds of editorial treatment.
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Literary scholarship on the work of Samuel Beckett is cresting a wave brought about by the new availability of significant primary material—particularly the notebooks in which Beckett recorded his reading notes and early fragments of... more
Literary scholarship on the work of Samuel Beckett is cresting a wave brought about by the new availability of significant primary material—particularly the notebooks in which Beckett recorded his reading notes and early fragments of literary composition (Nixon and Van Hulle 2013; Nixon 2011; Feldman 2006b; Pilling 1992, 1999;Maxwell 2006;Bryden et al. 1998), as well as published volumes of letters (Beckett 2009, 2012). This heightened documentary awareness in Beckett studies has stimulated renewed attention to such hermeneutic matters as text structure, continuities of themes and tropes in Beckett’s reading and note-taking, and the varieties of citation and allusion in his texts. Analogous forms of literary scholarship and critical interpretation also flourish, including a series of monumental annotative studies of specific Beckett texts (Pilling 2004; Ackerley 1998, 2005; Ackerley and Gontarski 2004). Consequently this activity has provoked new insights into aspects of Beckett’s composition processes and the material state of his manuscripts and published works. Manuscript documents in particular provide a broader and richer framework within which to describe the Beckett ‘text’ as a literary event or process. Current efforts to digitize these documents and provide authoritative transcriptions of them compel acute reflections on the status of Beckett’s texts and the editorial methods adequate to the task of establishing and representing them in scholarly editions. The narrator of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, Watt, neatly captures this tension between diachrony and formal repetition in narrative form and textual structure when he states: ‘Watt’s sense of chronology was strong, in a way, and his dislike for battology was very strong’ (Beckett 1959, 165).
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory gives a comprehensive coverage of every aspect of literary theory, both traditional and contemporary. Led by Editor in Chief John Frow and Associate Editors Mark Byron, Pelagia Goulimari, Sean... more
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory gives a comprehensive coverage of every aspect of literary theory, both traditional and contemporary. Led by Editor in Chief John Frow and Associate Editors Mark Byron, Pelagia Goulimari, Sean Pryor, and Julie Rak, the encyclopedia features around 175 essays written by a wide range of experts and distinguished scholars to explore the problems, the concepts, and the methodologies that arise when we discuss literary texts. They ask what systems of value go into making this category, separating “literary” from other kinds of text or other language games; what a “text” is, what kinds of text there are, and who decides; what it means to “read” a text: to understand it literally, to react to it emotionally, to look for broader structures of meaning, to understand it in relation to the context in which it was written or the contexts in which it was later understood; who “we” are who read; how reading relates to writing, and who or what the author ...
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This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to newly available primary sources and recent methodological developments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the state of Pound&#39;s... more
This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to newly available primary sources and recent methodological developments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the state of Pound&#39;s texts, both those upon which he relied for source material and those he produced in manuscript and print. Part II provides a comprehensive overview of the relation between Pound&#39;s poetry and translations and scholarship in East Asian Studies. Part III examines the radical reconception of Pound&#39;s cultural and political activities throughout his career, and his continuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent controversial scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural theory. Pound&#39;s wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests are given new analytic treatment, with an emphasis on how recent developments in gender and sexuality studies, medieval historiography, textual genetics, sound studies, visual cultures, and other fields can develop an understanding of Pound&#39;s poetry and prose.
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What is allegory? What can it tell us? What kinds of intellectual and tropological structures inform the production and reception of allegory? Is it generalizable, or is it specific to particular cultural formations? The vast project of... more
What is allegory? What can it tell us? What kinds of intellectual and tropological structures inform the production and reception of allegory? Is it generalizable, or is it specific to particular cultural formations? The vast project of Fredric Jameson&#39;s Allegory and Ideology locates these questions in the long history of allegorical analysis, identifying the structures that undergird much of the Western tropological imaginary and that provide ways of modulating individual identity with collective action and belief: namely, ideology. Yet Jameson&#39;s critique of allegory goes beyond this relation, showing how more complex forms of allegory extend into allegoresis, whereby the gaps and slippages in the structure of allegory afford libidinal energies that in turn subject allegory to its own critical apparatus.
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<p>Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the... more
<p>Close reading describes a set of procedures and methods that distinguishes the scholarly apprehension of textual material from the more prosaic reading practices of everyday life. Its origins and ancestry are rooted in the exegetical traditions of sacred texts (principally from the Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Islamic traditions) as well as the philological strategies applied to classical works such as the Homeric epics in the Greco-Roman tradition, or the Chinese詩經 (<italic>Shijing</italic>) or <italic>Classic of Poetry</italic>. Cognate traditions of exegesis and commentary formed around Roman law and the canon law of the Christian Church, and they also find expression in the long tradition of Chinese historical commentaries and exegeses on the Five Classics and Four Books. As these practices developed in the West, they were adapted to medieval and early modern literary texts from which the early manifestations of modern secular literary analysis came into being in European and American universities. Close reading comprises the methodologies at the center of literary scholarship as it developed in the modern academy over the past one hundred years or so, and has come to define a central set of practices that dominated scholarly work in English departments until the turn to literary and critical theory in the late 1960s. This article provides an overview of these dominant forms of close reading in the modern Western academy. The focus rests upon close reading practices and their codification in English departments, although reference is made to non-Western reading practices and philological traditions, as well as to significant nonanglophone alternatives to the common understanding of literary close reading.</p>
<p>Textual studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually, document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated, and propose ways in which they might... more
<p>Textual studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually, document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated, and propose ways in which they might be edited to minimize error and maximize the text's integrity. The vast temporal reach of the history of textuality—from oral traditions spanning thousands of years and written forms dating from the 4th millenium <sc>bce</sc> to printed and digital text forms—is matched by its geographical range covering every linguistic community around the globe. Methods of evaluating material text-bearing documents and the reliability of their written or printed content stem from antiquity, often paying closest attention to sacred texts as well as to legal documents and literary works that helped form linguistic and social group identity. With the incarnation of the printing press in the early modern West, the rapid reproduction of text matter in large quantities had the effect of corrupting many texts with printing errors as well as providing the technical means of correcting such errors more cheaply and quickly than in the preceding scribal culture.</p> <p>From the 18th century, techniques of textual criticism were developed to attempt systematic correction of textual error, again with an emphasis on scriptural and classical texts. This "golden age of philology" slowly widened its range to consider such foundational medieval texts as Dante's <italic>Commedia</italic> as well as, in time, modern vernacular literature. The technique of stemmatic analysis—the establishment of family relationships between existing documents of a text—provided the means for scholars to choose between copies of a work in the pursuit of accuracy. In the absence of original documents (manuscripts in the hand of Aristotle or the four Evangelists, for example) the choice between existing versions of a text were often made eclectically—that is, drawing on multiple versions—and thus were subject to such considerations as the historic range and geographical diffusion of documents, the systematic identification of common scribal errors, and matters of translation.</p> <p>As the study of modern languages and literatures consolidated into modern university departments in the later 19th century, new techniques emerged with the aim of providing reliable literary texts free from obvious error. This aim had in common with the preceding philological tradition the belief that what a text means—discovered in the practice of hermeneutics—was contingent on what the text states—established by an accurate textual record that eliminates error by means of textual criticism. The methods of textual criticism took several paths through the 20th century: the Anglophone tradition centered on editing Shakespeare's works by drawing on the earliest available documents—the printed Quartos and Folios—developing into the Greg–Bowers–Tanselle copy-text "tradition" which was then deployed as a method by which to edit later texts. The status of variants in modern literary works with multiple authorial manuscripts—not to mention the existence of competing versions of several of Shakespeare's plays—complicated matters sufficiently that editors looked to alternate editorial models. Genetic editorial methods draw in part on German editorial techniques, collating all existing manuscripts and printed texts of a work in order to provide a record of its composition process, including epigenetic processes following publication. The French methods of <italic>critique génétique</italic> also place the documentary record at the center, where the dossier is given priority over any one printed edition, and poststructuralist theory is used to examine the process of "textual invention." The inherently social aspects of textual production—the author's interaction with agents, censors, publishers, and printers and the way these interactions shape the content and presentation of the text—have reconceived how textual authority and variation are understood in the social and economic contexts of publication. And, finally, the advent of digital publication platforms has given rise to new developments in the presentation of textual editions and manuscript documents, displacing copy-text editing in some fields such as modernism studies in favor of genetic or synoptic models of composition and textual production.</p>
Early medieval philosophy and textuality afford crucial insights into the aesthetic project of The Cantos, notably the work of the Irish Carolingian thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, and his late classical (Martianus Capella, Boethius) and... more
Early medieval philosophy and textuality afford crucial insights into the aesthetic project of The Cantos, notably the work of the Irish Carolingian thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, and his late classical (Martianus Capella, Boethius) and Eastern Christian sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa). Pound absorbed much of this recondite knowledge by way of philosophy textbooks, as many of the source texts were simply not available to him in the 1930s and early 1940s. Pound also absorbed several facets of early medieval textual culture, and these are clearly visible in his poetry and prose. The early medieval surge in encyclopaedic texts, the gathering up of classical knowledge in urgent acts of preservation, bears acute analogy with Pound’s own encyclopaedic imperatives and practices. The text of The Cantos is significantly altered in its physical layout during this period of intensive reading and research in early medieval textuality. Pound even produces cantos on unrelated historical subjects – the life of John Adams, the dynastic history of China – that seem to mimic and emulate these earlier transformations in textual culture, performing these textual histories on the text’s surface.
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Samuel Beckett’s Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett’s prose, drama, and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett’s... more
Samuel Beckett’s Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett’s prose, drama, and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett’s texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self- awareness, Beckett’s late prose narratives – Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho – comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett’s own oeuvre.
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The history of literature is replete with stories of sea migrations, the topographical potency of mountains, and the sparse allurements of the desert. But what might we make of narratives dealing with geographies lacking such thalassan... more
The history of literature is replete with stories of sea migrations, the topographical potency of mountains, and the sparse allurements of the desert. But what might we make of narratives dealing with geographies lacking such thalassan potentialities, arid purities, or the symbolic inducements of craggy altitudes? This paper will attempt to map out how Gerald Murnane negotiates inland semi-arid zones in Inland and will examine how elements of prose style contribute to the performance of this act. The steppe, plain, grassland – unvaried topography neither desert nor littoral, neither urban nor rural, yet a strangely replenishing source for agriculture, husbandry, and the history of human migrations – provide remarkably distinct material by which to understand their specific mediations of narrative modes. Further, such undifferentiated topographies impel deep reflection upon the very point of prose style: what is it for, and what is it meant to do?
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Gerald Murnane is the pre-eminent chronicler of Irish-Australian Catholic male youth: its spiritual curiosity, onanistic fantasies and inevitable guilt, and the irresistible attraction to the arcane and the ceremonial. His early novels... more
Gerald Murnane is the pre-eminent chronicler of Irish-Australian Catholic male youth: its spiritual curiosity, onanistic fantasies and inevitable guilt, and the irresistible attraction to the arcane and the ceremonial. His early novels chart the inner lives of adolescent protagonists – Clement Killeaton in Tamarisk Row (1974) and Adrian Sherd in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976) – chronicling their agonistic struggles with Catholicism and self-abuse, set in the drought-stricken plains of rural Victoria. The specifically Irish-Catholic content turns on Murnane’s deliberate approximations between narrative and autobiography, sufficiently non-identical to bear plausible deniability and which lend the narration a sardonic and amused tone. His later novel Inland (1988) also has its protagonist meditating copiously on his Irish Catholic upbringing and its effects on his understanding of faith, his capacity to enter into romantic relationships, and his sense of the world. The narrative is channelled through a geography of the grasslands of Melbourne County, refracted by meditations on the Hungarian Alföld (an exclave of the great Eurasian steppe) and the South Dakotan prairie. This displacement of Irish-Australia by way of Hungary and North America comprises a deft method by which to examine masculine Australian Irish Catholicity out in plain sight, where geomorphology, ecology, and matters of national identity illuminate the meridians of the Irish-Australian Catholic diaspora.
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The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as... more
The pivotal role of medieval European poetry on the aesthetics of Ezra Pound is well known: he received graduate training in Provençal and was committed to lifelong study of the Troubadours, whose innovations in poetic form he saw as precursors to Dante’s great elder contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti. Pound placed sufficient stock in Guido’s shaping role in the European poetic tradition that he undertook to publish a deluxe edition of the Rime, complete with photographic plates of manuscripts on vellum, putting more than one press out of business in the process. It was not only poetry that drove this fixation for Pound, but a conviction that medieval poets kept alight a flame of Gnostic wisdom counter to the predominating currents of Thomistic inflections of Aristotle. He saw in Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel the preservation of light philosophy reaching back beyond Grosseteste and Eriugena to the Presocratics and the early Neoplatonists. A tenuous but pivotal part of this hidden heritage resided in the Arabic transmission of classical texts, as well as major commentaries, especially those of Avicenna and Averroes on Aristotle’s De Anima. Scholars such as Peter Liebregts and Peter Makin have done admirable work in identifying and annotating the various citations and suggestive hints of this tradition throughout Pound’s poetry and prose. This paper seeks to establish wider aesthetic and strategic contexts for Pound’s use of medieval Arabic light philosophy: what purpose did this heritage serve for the poet who urged his peers to Make It New? How does it inflect his poetics, and how does it intersect with his personal and professional circumstances at particular points in his career? This attempt to give a broader picture to Pound’s very particular medievalism aims to give perspective on Modernist poetics, shaped in significant part by his influence.
Research Interests: Philosophy, Modernism (Literature), Aristotle, Neoplatonism and late antique philosophy, Literature, and 15 moreArabic, Medievalism, Modernist poetry, Islamic Philosophy, Medieval Islam, Poetics, Ezra Pound, Modernism, Guido Cavalcanti, Neoplatonism, Avicenna, Averroes, Alfarabi, De Anima, and Medieval Aristotle Reception
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Art, Modernist poetry, Poetics, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), and 10 moreEzra Pound, Chinese poetry, Modernism, Contemporary American Poetry, Literary studies, Twentieth Century American Poetry, Gary Snyder, Chinese Art - Calligraphy & Ink Painting, Historical Poetics, and Modern American Poetry
Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah is an astonishing achievement in Australian Indigenous cinema and, in a global context, Fourth Cinema. Combining the realism of violence and dispossession within Central Desert Indigenous... more
Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah is an astonishing achievement in Australian Indigenous cinema and, in a global context, Fourth Cinema. Combining the realism of violence and dispossession within Central Desert Indigenous communities, particularly violence against women and minors, with sharp ground–level cinematography and extensive use of silence, the film builds on a recent wave of experimental Indigenous film–making to refract narratives of Indigenous experience in striking ways. That it performs such an acute critique of cultural marginalization and of its representation in film culture by means of expert filmic technique is distinction enough. That it accomplishes such a nuanced and intelligent response to a history of dispossession and of marginal cultural representation with two first–time screen actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, is astonishing. Their subtle performances – McNamara’s character makes only one utterance, his name, during the entire film – become magnetic embodiments of their narrative predicament. They situate the viewer as witness to violence and prejudice, and as an inheritor of a history of physical and spiritual violence. Rather than dwell in didacticism, the film instead liberates its characters by virtue of their resilience, having survived their trials. In placing two teenage Indigenous subjects at the heart of a feature film, Samson and Delilah is a decisive act of revelation, a gesture towards other stories yet untold.
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Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett's sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published... more
Scholarly research over the last twenty years has marked a profound shift in the understanding of Beckett's sources, his methods of composition, and his attitudes towards citation and allusion in manuscript documents and published texts. Such landmark studies as James Knowlson's biography, Damned to Fame (1996), and John Pilling's edition of the Dream Notebook (1999), and the availability of primary documents such as Beckett's reading notes at Reading and Trinity libraries, opened the way for a generation of work rethinking Beckett's textual habitus. Given this profound reappraisal of Beckett's material processes of composition, this paper seeks to show that Beckett's late prose work, Worstward Ho, represents a profound mediation on writing, self-citation, and habits of allusion to the literary canon. In its epic gestures, it reorients the heavenly aspiration of Dante's Commedia earthwards, invoking instead the language of agriculture, geology and mas...
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Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his... more
Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his poem to perform as a repository for important ideas and their often-precarious textual transmission, his project was also aimed at the poetic representation of a paradiso terrestre, an ideal state of intellectual community at the end of history. Consequently, in a critical phase during the 1930s he was drawn to models of theological and political eschatology, not least those of the Confucian cosmos and Italian Fascism. This intensified interest was to have drastic consequences: Pound was arrested on charges of treason and subsequently detained in the US Army Disciplinary Training Center outside of Pisa for his radio broadcasts during World War Two in Italy. During his incarceration Pound wrote much of The Pisan cantos, in which pastoral observation is combined with political vituperation and nostalgic reminiscence. Pound also makes sustained reference to John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Hibernian-Carolingian theologian and poet who was condemned on account of disseminating heretical doctrines during his lifetime and again posthumously in the Averroist condemnations at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. Following the war and the publication of The Pisan cantos (for which Pound was controversially awarded the inaugural Bollingen Prize), Pound’s epic turned to increasingly fragmented meditations on law, economics, political history and cultural production. In these later cantos, the ruined dream of his paradise terrestre is glimpsed at in the world of the Na-Khi, a Chinese ethnic minority adhering to matriarchal social structures and demonstrating a deeply ecological system of knowledge. This essay will explore the ways in which these apparently disparate sources provide Pound with a means by which to imagine a paradise in his poem in the midst of its disillusion in his own life.
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Ezra Pound’s call to ‘Make It New’ spoke a sense of compositional immediacy to his literary contemporaries by way of an ancient motto: the inscription the ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 BCE) made on the side of his... more
Ezra Pound’s call to ‘Make It New’ spoke a sense of compositional immediacy to his literary contemporaries by way of an ancient motto: the inscription the ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 BCE) made on the side of his bathtub and immortalised more than a thousand years later in the Confucian Da Xue (The Great Learning): 薪 日 日 薪 (xin ri ri xin). This is a timely phrase: Modernism Studies, like many areas of literary work, faces extraordinary challenges and opportunities in the digital shift taking place at the levels of textual studies, literary interpretation and literary theory. Pound’s call for a cultural rinascimento demands not only that writers learn from the fullest range of venerable sources and traditions in the course of literary experimentation, but also that their readers sharpen an awareness as to how material forms of inscription directly shape the identity and meaning of texts. This challenge cuts across recent work in textual and manuscript studies, particularly in the representation of complex Modernist texts and their manuscripts (for example the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project).
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Johannes Eriugena, the ninth-century theologian and poet, serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. In particular, Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De... more
Johannes Eriugena, the ninth-century theologian and poet, serves a critical function in Ezra Pound’s thinking on medieval theology and its formative role in his aesthetics. In particular, Eriugena’s masterwork, the Periphyseon or De Divisione Naturae, provides Pound with a totalising account of history in its exegetical model of the reditus (the return of creation to the godhead), an eschatology which accompanies Pound’s other preferred models for a paradiso terrestre: the Confucian world order and Italian Fascism. Although there is minimal critical scholarship on Eriugena’s significance in Pound’s prose and poetry, this Carolingian thinker plays a crucial part in Pound’s development of an anti-Aquinian view of medieval theology, part of an obscured tradition that is in itself millennial, and which serves to overturn what Pound saw as conventional, retrograde religious and social eschatologies. Eriugena’s significance is evident in critical passages of the Cantos – particularly Canto 36, the ‘Donna mi prega’ canto, and the Pisan Cantos – as well as in Pound’s prose. Pound also drew up extensive notes for a book on Eriugena, to form a trilogy with his books on the Ta Hio and Mencius, but which never eventuated in publication. These notes throw additional light onto the crucial role Eriugena plays for Pound in his vision for the paradisal poet who speaks for and from the end of days.
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Beckett's 1953 novel Watt is justifiably known as the ‘white whale’ of Beckett Studies. Its wartime composition history in conditions of compound displacement, from the first tentative notes in 1941 to the first attempts at... more
Beckett's 1953 novel Watt is justifiably known as the ‘white whale’ of Beckett Studies. Its wartime composition history in conditions of compound displacement, from the first tentative notes in 1941 to the first attempts at publication in 1945, traces out a process of manuscript revision, recirculation, fragmentation and recombination: a process in which art and life echoed each other's estrangements. The complicated journey into print bore its own pitfalls, where textual error combined with evidence of partial narrative excisions, serial non sequiturs, and a post-narrative midden of fragments both insinuated within and separated from the story of Watt and his master. This essay engages in a close examination of a selected range of variant types between published editions and between published text and manuscript (and partial typescript). There is no golden key, but a pattern emerges whereby an ambivalent alternation between presence and absence of textual material indicates...
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1. Pound's Eriugena: Neoplatonist and Scholar of Greek 2. The Missing Book of the Trilogy 3. Pound's Unwobbling Pivot 4. The Poetics of Exile: Laon to Changsha Bibliography Index
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An Introduction to the special issue of Affirmations 4.1 on the topic of Transnational Modernisms, at http://affirmations.arts.unsw.edu.au/index.php?journal=aom&amp;page=issue&amp;op=current
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The poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe have inspired a varied abundance of adaptations and emulations. These acts of homage range from prose narratives, poems, and graphic novels, to dramatic and operatic performances, to animation... more
The poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe have inspired a varied abundance of adaptations and emulations. These acts of homage range from prose narratives, poems, and graphic novels, to dramatic and operatic performances, to animation comedy and visual artworks. Yet at the gravitational centre of Poe adaptation is the feature film. Throughout the history of cinema filmmakers and directors have found Poe's texts irresistible, and none more than 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (1839). This short prose text has generated dozens of filmic adaptations of striking aesthetic and formal variety. The combination of Gothic literary conventions, an emotionally suggestible narrator, and contemporary themes of moral and physical degeneracy provide ample stimulus for creative re-imagining of the fate of the house's inhabitants. This text provokes an unrivalled cinematic experimentalism when compared with almost any other frequently adapted pre-cinematic text, such as the novels of...
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This paper will demonstrate an advanced work in progress, the digitised manuscript and transcription of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (composed in 1941-45 and first published in 1953). Discussion of the project will centre upon the digital... more
This paper will demonstrate an advanced work in progress, the digitised manuscript and transcription of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (composed in 1941-45 and first published in 1953). Discussion of the project will centre upon the digital resources buttressing the presentation of manuscript material and a range of related analytic features, and will outline some of the more significant ways in which specifically digital treatment of the material opens up new lines of literary and textual analysis. Indeed, some foundational concepts of textuality come into sharp focus by virtue of digital treatment of textual materials. Some of these concerns will be illustrated by way of examples taken from the Watt project, and by a fuller view of the complex relationship between text and manuscript arising from the project.
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Research Interests:
Modernist literary texts produced in the early years of the twentieth century stake out a direct challenge to conventional notions of literary language, genre, and even the concept of the literary text itself: such novels as James Joyce‘s... more
Modernist literary texts produced in the early years of the twentieth century stake out a direct challenge to conventional notions of literary language, genre, and even the concept of the literary text itself: such novels as James Joyce‘s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), the concrete poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and the Italian Futurists, and the strange poetic decompositions of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (to cite a few striking examples), provide an array of challenges to reading and interpretation, and even to the basic task of identifying the text object. Experiments in form, particularly by writers who self-identified with the avant-garde, continue to fundamentally challenge scholarly practices of reading, critical evaluation, and editing. Scholars have honed these practices, in turn, to seek new ways to understand Modernist textuality more fully.
Research Interests: Geology and Ezra Pound
This paper revises an argument made in my paper “In a Station of the Cantos: Ezra Pound’s ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto and the Shō-Shō Hakkei Tekagami,” Literature and Aesthetics 22.2 (2012): 138-152. Here I provide a more extended close reading... more
This paper revises an argument made in my paper “In a Station of the Cantos: Ezra Pound’s ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto and the Shō-Shō Hakkei Tekagami,” Literature and Aesthetics 22.2 (2012): 138-152. Here I provide a more extended close reading of Canto XLIX to show how Pound mediates ideas of an 'Eastern' aesthetic with an American pastoral poetic tradition.
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L OGIC ’ S D OUBT : T HE S PANISH T RAGEDY AND T AMBURLAINE by Mark Byron Tragedie is to seyne a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and... more
L OGIC ’ S D OUBT : T HE S PANISH T RAGEDY AND T AMBURLAINE by Mark Byron Tragedie is to seyne a certeyn storie, As olde bookes maken us memorie, Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. Chaucer, The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale E quel che voglio io, nessum lo sa; Intendo io; quel mi bastera. [And what I desire, nobody knows; I understand, that’s enough for me.] Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine 1 operate as political drama. The motif of tyranny for the individual subject is given a peculiarly personal status in the lives of Kyd and Marlowe: both suffered the suspicions of heresy and the violent intrigues of the Privy Council. Marlowe’s life has been especially singled out by critics as an example and symptom of Elizabethan espionage. Both The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine offer apotropaic gestures toward the Elizabethan political climate— particularly the espionage circle of Si...
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Beckett’s late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the... more
Beckett’s late prose texts Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho perform a radical process of literary reimagination late in a long writing career: they reconfigure how biography relates to narrative, and they rethink the dimensionality and mobility of character. In their negotiations with literary history and etymology these texts replenish the stocks of language across the deep time of its evolution and its accrual of semantic and associative richness. In their rich geological and archaeological dispositions, the three texts of Nohow On demonstrate how deep time intersects with the narrative present in images of the earth, providing a locus for life and afterlife: both in the sense of the posthumous condition and in offering belated aesthetic possibilities.
Research Interests: Art and Literary studies
is a study in orientation. It plays upon the ability to locate itself (or oneself), or to be located, in space and time. In time performs a double-move of inheritance and prolepsis, looking both forward and backward in Beckett's... more
is a study in orientation. It plays upon the ability to locate itself (or oneself), or to be located, in space and time. In time performs a double-move of inheritance and prolepsis, looking both forward and backward in Beckett's writing career and also in the very peculiar circumstances of this novel's composition and journey into print. In space the irregularities of the text's surface hint at the complex and partially submerged relations between the text and its looming, unruly archive. This essay will enumerate some of the ways in which is an ecstatic text – in which it is beside itself and never simply just 'there'.