How did literature become modern? Few books written on this question have had the influence and the swagger of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Notorious both for its seductive style and its placement of the controversial poet Ezra Pound at the center of its story about modernist literary innovation, this book traces the relationship between a dynamic, modern social scene and the aesthetic strategies that emerged from it. With Pound as its focal point, the book traverses the writing of figures including James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. Kenner was intimate with his subject as well his archive, making frequent visits to the asylum where Pound, indicted for treason, was confined for much of his later life. Hard to dismiss, The Pound Era is both an impressively integrated study and—especially from a left perspective—a project in need of the serious interrogation to which subsequent generations of scholars have subjected it, complicating its portrait of high modernism with respect to politics, race, gender, and method. What is the legacy of Ezra Pound—and of the literary object that is The Pound Era? How does one read a landmark book with landmark flaws?
In this course, we’ll grapple with Kenner’s book alongside scholarly critiques of his work and extracts from the literature produced by Pound and his circle, all in the service of understanding modernism and its reception. Our primary questions will include some of the following: what was Ezra Pound’s modernism? Does Kenner’s identification of a Pound era stand up to the historical record? How should we understand the aesthetic codes of modernism, and how did Pound shape them? Is literary modernism better understood in terms of historical rupture or continuity? How should we place aesthetic modernisms with respect to technological and social transformation? What does The Pound Era leave out about race, gender, and literary and artistic production? What are the politics of Kenner’s book? What are the politics of modernism, and how do they relate to modern aesthetics? How do we read against the grain?
