Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound's Contemporaneity by Paul Stasi Josephine Park

Abstract

MLR, .,   from traditional modernist scholarship and that are figured by their fragmented, serial form. Each chapter of the book takes on a major work by an American modernist writer—ree Lives by Gertrude Stein, Cane by Jean Toomer, Manhattan Transfer and ‘Cosmopolitan’ by John Dos Passos, and e Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Beeston understands these works as exemplars of composite modernist writing, which indicates a formal structure of repetition and reiteration and the representation of what Beeston calls ‘woman in series’ (p. ). Here, the critical purchase of her argument clearly snaps into focus on the way that gender and its representational politics emerge within seriality. ere is a palpable urgency to Beeston’s claims about gender, race, and seriality, which reflects a deep desire on the part of the author to modernize modernist studies. However, it would be a mistake simply to assume that this book merely operates under the moniker of the ‘New Modernist Studies’ (now, of course, a decade old). roughout, Beeston is less interested in moving away from the canon for the sake of the mandates of expansive politics or a desire to be relevant. Instead, she burrows into forgotten spaces of the established archive to remind us that the unseen is right beneath our noses. I would like to remark on the methodology of In and Out of Sight, which is unabashedly and refreshingly heuristic. Rather than charting direct lines of influence between word and image, Beeston relies on an associative model of ‘combination and accrual’ (p. ), which is a necessary and powerful approach to interdisciplinary analysis and literary criticism. Juxtaposition and its attendant gaps appeal to Beeston in both photographic and analytical form: she draws together Stein and surrealist photography, Toomer and lynching photographs, Dos Passos and the use of photography in advertising, and Fitzgerald and cinema’s investment in seriality. e myriad works considered, however, extend far beyond this schematic summary; indeed, the strength and ambition of this densely layered book lie in its capacious reach through literary and photographic forms and genres. More than due diligence, Beeston carefully establishes a body of criticism into which her own book might be situated and forges an exciting direction for future work in modernist studies, photography and literature, still-moving studies, and feminist studies. U  C, L A L H Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity. Ed. by P S and J P. London: Bloomsbury Academic. . xiii+ pp.£ (pbk £). ISBN –––– (pbk ––––). ‘What can we learn from Pound?’ (p. ). is is the question that Christopher Bush poses at the start of his contribution to Paul Stasi and Josephine Park’s rewarding co-edited collection. Bush’s question is surely excellent, though not easily answered. As to why that might be so, there are a number of competing factors that need to be kept in mind. Some of these have to do with aesthetic theory  Reviews and historical understanding, while others concern matters more overtly social, economic, and even geopolitical. All of these things come to the fore in the eight chapters comprising Stasi and Park’s at times revelatory multiauthored undertaking pertaining to the Idaho-born writer thought by some critics to be in equal measure the most serious and the most difficult of modernist characters. ‘e seeds of [the] book began in ,’ Stasi and Park note, when we each found ourselves teaching e Cantos. Noting the number of Poundian themes that seemed ‘in the air’—from the recognition of the sins of finance capital, to a renewed interest in China, and a fetishized investment in the founding fathers— we found ourselves rethinking many of our assumptions about his work. In light of contemporary events, Pound seemed different—and relevant all over again. (p. vii) I quote at length from Stasi and Park here not only because this extract usefully signposts some of the guiding thematic preoccupations of the volume itself, but because it draws attention to how a sustained interrogation of those self-same preoccupations might serve initially to remind and then subsequently transform some of the preconceived understandings, opinions, and critical myths that have built up around Ezra Pound over the decades. But this is...