The Reception of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in Prewar Japan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akitoshi Nagahata
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Nishiwaki Junzaburo

Modernist literature was introduced to Japan in the early 20th century, and some of it took root. While modernism, a new movement in art and literature, was first developed in Europe, American poets, especially Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, played a major role in its development. Both of these poets were expatriates, living in Europe after they left the United States. As this fact indicates, there was an international, cosmopolitan nature to modernism, which was also seen in other modernist writers and poets, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hilda “H. D.” Doolittle, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Eugene Jolas, to name just a few; this internationalist appeal was also an important factor in the early reception of modernism by the Japanese. In literature in English, Noguchi Yonejirō (Yone Noguchi) and Nishiwaki Junzaburō, for example, had contact with modernist writers abroad, published their own works in English, and introduced foreign poets they knew to Japanese readers. Takahashi Shinkichi, Kitasono Katue (Kitazono Katsue), and other poets also had correspondence with poets and writers of foreign countries and exchanged their works. Following the initial encounter between Japanese poets and modernist American poets at the beginning of the 20th century, their works were introduced to Japanese readers of literature in English in the late 1920s. At the time, within academia, American literature was still considered part of English literature. Although mass-market literature series included many American literature titles, especially novels, the curricula in the English departments at major universities rarely included American literature. Besides, even in English literature studies, the focus was mainly on 19th-century (and earlier) authors, and modernist poetry was still not getting much attention. Thus, the reception of modernist American poetry in Japanese academia was generally slow. Instead, it was literary magazines such as Shi to shiron that actively introduced modernist poetry (including Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound) to Japanese readers. Modernist poetry in English was often seen as “intellectualist” in Japan. As the control of freedom of speech and publication tightened in the late 1930s and the 1940s, in keeping with Japan’s militarization and totalitarianism, it became difficult to read and write about foreign literature. In this situation, adhering to modernist and intellectualist literature assumed its symbolic meaning of resistance. While under totalitarian rule, older Japanese modernists converted themselves into collaborationists, and younger poets such as Ayukawa Nobuo, who started a magazine called Arechi (The waste land), tried their best to maintain their literary independence. They became leading figures in postwar Japanese poetry.

US–Japan Literary Interactions in the Transpacific Cultural History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Moby Dick

In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry opened not only the doors of a “double-bolted land” as Herman Melville called Japan in Moby-Dick (1851) but also the possibilities of modern literature. While it is a half-Chinook, half-Scot American called Ranald McDonald who smuggled himself into Japan in 1848 and became the first teacher of English in the country, Gerald Vizenor, a distinguished Native American novelist, completed a postmodern novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), remixing Moby-Dick with Matsuo Basho’s haiku travelogue Narrow Road to the Far North, Lafcadio Hearn a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, and Ranald MacDonald’s Japan: Story of Adventure. After the opening of Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), one of the founding fathers of modern Japan, visited Europe and the United States of America, and decided to Westernize his own country. Being the first translator of Thomas Jefferson’s composed “The Declaration of Independence,” Fukuzawa published a million-selling An Encouragement of Learning (a series of seventeen pamphlets published from 1872 to 1876), in which the author emphasized the significance of sciences and the spirit of independence in the way comparable to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (1837) and “The American Scholar” (1841). While Professor Thomas Sergeant Perry, a great nephew of Commodore Perry, started teaching American literature in 1898 at Keio University, which Fukuzawa established, Yone Noguchi (Noguchi Yonejiro, 1875–1947), a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe and Matsuo Basho, became famous as a cosmopolitan poet in the United States, receiving good reviews for the first collection of poems all written in English, Seen and Unseen (1896). It is highly plausible that his correspondence with Ezra Pound provided the latter with a key to promoting the poetics of imagism. Following the example of Noguchi, Nishiwaki Junzaburo (1894–1982), another cosmopolitan poet famous for the translation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, studied English literature and philology at Oxford University and published in 1925 the first volume of poetry Spectrum in London. Thus, Ezra Pound, who once admired Yone Noguchi in the 1910s, came to recommend Nishiwaki as the finalist for the Nobel Literary Prize in 1957. The year 1955 saw the first postwar climax of transpacific literary history. William Faulkner, a major American modernist and recent laureate of Nobel Prize in Literature, paid his first visit to Japan in the summer of 1955, giving a series of seminars in Nagano. Speculating on Japanese culture, he gave an insight into the literary affinity between Japan and the American South in an open letter entitled “To the Youth of Japan.” American as he is, Faulkner shares the memory of lost war with the postwar Japanese, for he came from Mississippi, part of the Deep South, the very defeated nation in the Civil War. Without this memory of lost war, Faulkner could not have developed his apocryphal imagination. Therefore, it is very natural that Faulkner’s visit to Japan invited quite a few major Japanese authors to develop their own apocryphal imagination, ending up with major works published in 1973, the year of Oil Shock, all inspired by Faulkner’s double novel The Wild Palms (1939): Endo Shusaku’s Catholic novel Upon the Dead Sea, Oe Kenzaburo’s nuclear novel The Flood Invades My Soul, and Komatsu Sakyo’s science fiction novel Japan Sinks. Noting that the year of 1973 also saw the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, we could well locate here the genesis of transpacific postmodern literature in the 21st century.

scholarly journals NATURE, INACTION AND ILLUSION: THE INFLUENCE OF TAOISM ON AMERICAN POETRY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhu Lihong ◽  
Wang Feng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Tao Te Ching ◽  
Beat Movement ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
American Poets

<p>Taoism is one of the most fundamental thoughts in China, and Laozi’s Taoist theory is even more brilliant, shining through the entire history of Chinese culture. Taoist culture and thoughts through translation have influenced American poetry directly or indirectly. Tao Te Ching (also Laozi) has become the most widely translated Chinese classic in history with the largest circulation overseas. Moreover, its translation has become second only to the Bible. At present, most scholars tend to comment on its translations, and there are few researches on the influence of Taoist thoughts after translation. Therefore, this paper intends to focus on the influences of Taoism on American poetry after translation. The study is based on three major cultural movements in the 20th century in the United States: the New Poetry Movement, the Beat Movement and the Deep Imagist Movement, taking typical poems in these movements as the research objects. The study intends to illustrate the great influences of Taoism on the three cultural movements in the 20th century in the United States by means of close reading, comparative analysis from the perspective of diachronic research. It first introduces the three American movements briefly, enumerates the poets who absorbed Taoist ideas in the movements, and then explains specifically what thoughts they absorbed from Taoism through the comparative analysis between the original Taoist thoughts and the thoughts in American poet’s poetry. It demonstrated in detail that American poets absorbed Taoist thoughts that have an impact on their poetry writing as poets. During the New Poetry Movement, the poets advocated the Taoists view of nature. During the Beat Movement, they paid close attention to the view of “inaction”, while the poets of the Deep Image Group concentrated on the illusion under the view of “homogeneous things”, which promoted the diversified development of American poetry.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0620/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Global India in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Call Center ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
The World

Twenty-first-century Asian American literature is a developing archive of literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and multimodal cultural texts. As a field, it is marked by its simultaneous investments in exploring the United States’ imperial geopolitical relations and the concurrent rise of Asia. Global India, a shorthand for the nation’s ascendance onto the world stage after the liberalizing market reforms of the early 1990s, is discernible in Asian American—and particularly South Asian American—depictions of a range of figures including call center agents, entrepreneurial farmers, art gallery owners, and globe-trotting filmmakers. It is an India to which many writers imagine returning, given its heightened standing in the world economy and the prospect of American decline. This change marks a shift in the literature from the Americas being the primary locus of attachment to Asia as a site of possible reinvestment, both psychic and material. Asian American writers frequently focus on parallels between the experience of international migration and that of in-country migration to India’s major cities. They also tacitly register the rise of India in narratives about the abortive promises of the American dream. In comparison to Asian American literatures of the 20th century, which were primarily read as part of the multiethnic canon of American literature, Asian American literatures written under the sign of Global India are equally legible as part of diasporic, postcolonial, world, and global Anglophone literary formations. Many writers considered postcolonial in the 20th century may be profitably read in the 21st century as Asian American as well, whether because of a move to the United States or a professed affiliation. This expansion of the field is a consequence of the evolving diasporic and global imaginaries of Asian American writers and scholars.

Capturing Conquest: 20th Century Colonial Photography in the Philippine Islands and its 21st Century Musical Legacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalila Dahm
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary American Society

It is a common tool of empire to use racial othering to justify conquest of both land and body. Yet in spite of achieving independence twice, once from Spain in 1898 and again in 1946 from the United States, suggesting the end of colonial discourse, the question remains: why do Filipinas remain hyper-sexualized and fetishized today? The purpose of this project is to examine the tools of empire as a means of justifying an American colonial agenda in the Philippine islands. Particular attention is paid to musical representations and colonial photography to situate the hyper-sexualization, and eventual fetishization, of Filipinas in contemporary American society and 20th century American empire. To date, somewhat limited English literature exists on the topic of 20th century American colonial photography. And yet, sexualized representations of Filipinas are not limited to photography, nor did this view of Filipina bodies, and by extension Filipinas, suddenly stop after independence; problematically suggesting that consequences of empire, including race-based and/or sexual hierarchies, no longer exist. This paper hypothesizes why this imagery remains relevant in the 21st century through an examination of contemporary musical lyrics, suggesting that the hyper-sexualization of Filipinas is rampant in contemporary American society as a product of residual colonial discourse. Then, this paper attempts to retrace the start of American presence in the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898 by examining representations of Filipina bodies as a tool of empire, justifying American imperialism until the mid-20th century, marking the beginning of colonial rhetoric.

scholarly journals Jüri Talvet maailmaluule tõlgendajana / Jüri Talvet’s Interpretations of World Poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (17/18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauri Pilter
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Literature ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Tirso De Molina ◽  
Francisco De Quevedo ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Spanish Baroque ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The University

Teesid: Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse professori, luuletaja, kirjandusteadlase ja hispaaniakeelse kirjanduse spetsialisti Jüri Talveti tõlketegevuse viljade hulka kuulub luulet ja proosat nii sajandeid vanast Hispaania klassikast kui ka 20. sajandil või tänapäeval romaani keeltes või inglise keeles loodud teostest. Käesolev artikkel keskendub sellele, kuidas professor Talvet on tõlgendanud luule ja poeetika, kuid ka kirjandusajaloo, iseäranis barokk-kirjanduse alaseid küsimusi oma kirjandusteaduslikes esseedes. Vaadeldakse ka tema tõlketegevuse mahtu ja tõlketöö põhimõtteid. Jüri Talvet (born in 1945) is a poet and a scholar of comparative literature, Chair Professor of World Literature at the University of Tartu. His numerous translations of poetry and poetical fiction from the Romance languages and, to a lesser extent, from English, reflect his views on world poetry. Those views are also expressed in his theoretical writings from the years of 1977 to 2015. Having studied English literature as the main subject at the University of Tartu, he early developed an interest in Spanish, in other Iberian languages, and in the Iberoamerican literatures. His translations from that area include works from medieval and early modern literature as well as notable literary achievements from the 20th century and the contemporary era. Talvet’s interpretations of Federico García Lorca and the “Latin American boom” authors are supported by profound insights into the philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics of the 17th century Spanish Baroque literature, known as the literary Golden Age of Spain. The influence which Talvet’s activities have exerted has widened the horizons of Estonia’s literary culture: while in the early 20th century, the previous German, Russian and Finnish leanings were supplemented by orientations to, and translations from, French and Italian literatures, Talvet has helped to enrich the Estonian literary landscape with the mentality and traditions of even more distant language areas, such as Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and the Latin American countries. In the section “Quevedo and Góngora” of this article, Talvet’s interpretation of some of the key issues of dispute in the Baroque literature of Spain are studied, based both on his theoretical essays and on his translations of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Talvet has attempted to use the terms of the Baroque philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracián, agudeza, concepto (definable approximately as “conceit” or “wit”) and conceptismo, for the analysis of the late 20th century Estonian poetry. On that background, defnitions of conceptismo and cultismo (the other main school in Spanish Baroque poetry) are offered in this article, with implications that those definitions may have for understanding different styles and methods of poetry in general, and the characteristics of Talvet’s own poems and poetry translations in particular. To escape diffusion in pure sensuality and verbal indulgence, poetry has to rely on concepts as well as images. Talvet’s interpretations of poetry and poetical thinking are found to be close to conceptismo, or with a considerable amount of conceptuality inherent to them. The juxtaposition of paradoxical ideas from different levels of reality, social and psychic, is seen as the essential poetical method that Talvet refers to as he defines, quoting Yuri Lotman, the structural-semantic code of poetry as being “paradigmatic”. In the final section of the article, Talvet’s 23 book-length published translations are listed, including translations from Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The list does not include numerous translations of single poems or cycles of poetry that have appeared in literary journals, nor his contributions to anthologies of poetry, nor the translations from his native Estonian into a foreign language, such as Spanish or English, in which he has participated. His translations encompass lyrical works as well as fiction and plays. Talvet has translated classical European poetry, such as the sonnets of Petrarch and Quevedo and Provençal poems, as well as the rhymed poems of American poets into Estonian with complete metrical correspondence and full rhymes. However, in the latest decades Talvet has expressed scepticism in the sense and feasibility of attempting to convey the rhyming complexities of the major European literatures into Estonian, a language with a considerably smaller potential for finding full rhymes. Accordingly, his three translations of Spanish Baroque drama (by Calderón and Tirso de Molina) employ a liberal method of versification. In all his versatile activities as a poet, a translator, and a theorist of poetry, Professor Talvet has shown great devotion to developing and cultivating aesthetic values. A lot of his colleagues and students have benefited from his friendly advice. Thinking of his contributions to Estonia’s literary tradition, one may repeat and paraphrase the sentence that he used for the conclusion of his essay on the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu in 1977: “to write (and to translate) poetry is to work for the benefit of the people.”

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

Physiology of Intraluminal Administration of Carbon Dioxide as a Contrast Medium

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (44) ◽  
pp. 4656-4661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Patelis ◽  
Mikes Doulaptsis ◽  
Stylianos Kykalos ◽  
Eleftherios Spartalis ◽  
Anastasios Maskanakis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Contrast Agent ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Human Organism ◽  
Digital Subtraction ◽  
Extensive Search ◽  
Iodinated Contrast ◽  
Iodinated Contrast Agent ◽  
Carbon Dioxide Co2

Background: Carbon dioxide (CO2) exists in nature around us. In the middle of the 20th century, the intraluminal injection of CO2 demonstrated similar results to those of Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) with an iodinated contrast agent (ICA). Since then, the technology behind CO2 DSA has developed significantly. Objective: The aim of this study is to inform physicians about the unique properties of CO2 and its physiology after intraluminal injection. Methods: An extensive search for English literature on the properties of CO2 and the physiology of intraluminal administration was conducted using Pubmed. Results: There is sufficient literature on the properties of CO2 and the physiology of CO2 DSA. A review of this literature explains what happens to the human organism after the injection of CO2. Conclusions: There is enough evidence that CO2 DSA is both effective, diagnostic and safe, but the properties of CO2 should be taken under consideration as complications occur, although rarely.

An Example to Us All: Child Development and Identity Construction in Early 20th-Century Playgrounds

10.1068/a3237 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A Gagen
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
A Site ◽  
Us Cities

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which ‘inner’ identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.

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