Description
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. "In many ways, focusing on the topic of Pound and education seems at once self-evident and sharply problematic, given the poet's numerous rants against a reductive pedagogy based, as he complained again and again, on the ossified procedures of rote memorization, the simple recitation of facts, and the fetishization of biographical minutiae. By contrast, he sought to promote a dynamic, frankly evaluative emphasis on the cultivation of critical taste, the historically informed appreciation of literary value, and the comparative assessment of a given writer's significance viewed in relation to work produced both within his own linguistic heritage and in other languages across a range of distinct cultural traditions. In other words, in many ways Pound anticipated and advocated for a kind of critical approach to (again mainly literary) education that we currently strive to uphold. As in so many other instances, especially amid the realm of contemporary poetry, we again find ourselves abiding by terms that Pound helped to establish through his relentless and polymath cultural evangelism. Hence, a consideration of Pound's views on education substantially complicates commonly held perceptions (which all too often serve to validate simple dismissals) of him as a conservative, even reactionary, aesthete and thinker. We have therefore chosen essays that highlight, rather than evade or suppress, the contradictions and vexed affiliations enlivening his thought and underscore the continuing relevance of his work."—from the Introduction
EZRA POUND AND EDUCATION features work by Gail MacDonald, Anne Birien, Michael Webster, Andrew John Miller, Michael Thomas Davis and Cameron McWhirter, Alec Marsh, Peter Nicholls, Milton L. Welch, Alan Golding, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Bob Perelman. The volume also includes essays by Hamilton students Molly Wilson, Jake Hartnett, and Justin Jones, and Colgate students Jasmine V. Bailey, Lucas Meeker, and Ashley Lazevnick.
Author Bio
Steven Yao is Professor of English at Hamilton College, where he teaches Anglo-American modernism, Asian American literature, and translation history and theory. His publications include Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of the essay collections Sinographies: Writing China (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Pacific Rim Modernisms (Univeristy of Toronto Press, 2009). His essays have appeared in Textual Practice, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and Representations.
Michael Coyle, Professor of English at Colgate University, is founding President of the Modernist Studies Association and currently serves as Vice President of the T. S. Eliot Society. Previous edited collections include Ezra Pound and African American Modernism (National Poetry Foundation, 2001); Raymond Williams and Modernism (a special issue of Keywords, Summer 2003); and Broadcasting Modernism, with Debra Rae Cohen and Jane Lewty (University Press of Florida, 2009). He is as well the author of Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), and has published broadly on modernist literature and cultural history. His Professional Attention: Ezra Pound and the Career of Modernist Criticism is forthcoming from Camden House Press.
Author City: CLINTON, NY USA