Shifting metaphors: interarts comparisons and analogy

Abstract

Abstract In his Mnemosyne, Mario Praz employs this wide-ranging comparison: he finds similarities among the ‘quotations which seem to float like alien bodies in the sentences of Ezra Pound's Cantos and Eliot's The Waste Land’, the ‘collage in the paintings of Braque, Max Ernst, and others’, and Erik Satie's Parade. Initially, this sweeping comparison seems a helpful index to the art of this century, one that could indeed go further and describe much of Postmodernist poetry, architecture, and visual art. Praz is not alone; other critics find similar usefulness in these interarts comparisons. Jacob Korg attempts to demonstrate that the ‘fragmentation and re-integration observable in The Waste Land can be regarded as the same process as that used by the Cubists and Futurists’, while Hugh Kenner has argued that in Pound's ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ the ‘words lie flat like the forms on a Cubist surface’. More recently, Marjorie Perloff has claimed that Gertrude Stein's reference to a nail at the end of her...