Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem: 97 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 97)
Cambridge University Press, 4/26/1996
EAN 9780521496131, ISBN10: 0521496136
Hardcover, 336 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
This is a critical and historical interpretation of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's 'discovery' of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the 'language of nature'. This language of nature is here shown to be a mythic conception continuous with the Renaissance idea of the language of Adam - a language lacking any difference between what it is and what it means. Through analysing and contextualising the nineteenth-century works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Fenollosa and the twentieth-century creations of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.
1. Introduction
the European hallucination
2. Emerson and the language of nature
3. Character assassination
representing Chinese in nineteenth-century linguistics
4. Otto Jesperson and Chinese as the future of language
5. Language in its primary use
Fenollosa and the Chinese character
Interchapter
Pound, Emerson, and the poetics of creative reading
6. Modernising Orientalism/Orientalising modernism
Ezra Pound, Chinese translation, and English-as-Chinese
7. Seeing the world without language
Gary Snyder and Chinese as American speech.