Ezra Pound's Italian cantos: Collapse and recall.
Item
-
Title
-
Ezra Pound's Italian cantos: Collapse and recall.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9924801
-
identifier
-
9924801
-
Creator
-
Cockram, Patricia A.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Louis Menand
-
Date
-
1999
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | Literature, Romance | Literature, Comparative
-
Abstract
-
This is a two-part dissertation: an electronic, multi-media CD-ROM edition of Pound's Italian cantos; and a paper which serves as a textual companion and explores my theoretical approach to this material. The CD-ROM documents the themes discussed in the paper: the connections between the Italian Cantos and Pound's other poetry, specifically the break they indicate in Pound's own aesthetics and the recuperation of his poetics in the Pisan Cantos , and the similarities between the aesthetic Pound saw in Fascism and the kind of poetry he created in the Cantos. The decision to present part of the material in an electronic format and part in a printed one is based on the nature of each element. The CD-ROM enables a closer and more rapid scrutiny of the supporting materials, alternative versions, and explanatory notes furnished for a difficult and controversial text with multiple sources. On the other hand, the theoretical and editorial questions would be tedious to read on screen and are best expressed in print.;The Italian Cantos are not widely known and have received little critical attention. They appeared in the American and British editions of The Cantos for the first time in 1986, but without English translations. They lend themselves to textual analysis because of their complicated and changing relationship to the rest of the text of the Cantos and the documentation they provide of Pound's Fascism. In fact, evidence has surfaced recently that links these Cantos---and others like them, drafted in Italian but never completed---to the Pisan Cantos. The significance is in that connection and in the break these two poems represent in the Cantos, a rupture that may have made possible the genesis of the Pisan Cantos.;The CD-ROM allows the reader to experience these issues of aesthetics and ethics. Pound's poetry is particularly suited to an electronic format because of the complex network of allusions and intertextuality that he called his "ideogrammic" style. Section 9 of this paper describes hypertext and explains how Pound is an ideal subject for this project, both because much of his poetry works like hypertext and because such deeply allusive and densely interconnected texts can be experienced to advantage in a hypertext format. A final section describes the CD-ROM, and the Appendix explains how the electronic document works and how to view it.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
