Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Ezra Pound, and: Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (review)

2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-182
Author(s):  
Ranen Omer
2001 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 321
Author(s):  
Stephen Matterson ◽  
Luke Carson

Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown

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.


Author(s):  
Eric B. White

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.


Author(s):  
Gregory Maertz

Fascist modernism is an artistic and literary movement emphasizing extreme nationalism, romantic anti-capitalism, and cultural renewal most closely associated with Fascist Italy, Vichy France, and National Socialist Germany (see Nazi modernism) but also describing the fusion of innovative literary technique and reactionary politics found in the writings of leading American, English, and Irish modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats.


FORUM ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Dror Abend-David

Cet article utilise la traduction dans le but de mettre en évidence quelques malaises moraux majeurs ancrés dans la réalité quotidienne d'une culture américaine en apparence hétérogène et dont la prétention est de considérer que "tous les hommes sont semblables». La discussion porte sur deux types de relations. L'un concerne la relation oedipienne tourmentée et inquiétante existant entre les personnages de la Maison Blanche dans la série télévisée américaine « West Wing » , à savoir le Directeur de la Communication Toby Ziegler et le Président des Etats-Unis Josiah Bartlet. Le second est la relation intense et instable entre l'Amérique du moderniste Ezra Pound et son disciple juif au caractère obstiné , Louis Zukofsky. Tant dans le cas fictionnel de Toby Ziegler que dans celui non-fictionnel de Louis Zukofsky, la traduction apparaît telle que la langue et la culture des communautés immigrées se font sentir, soit dans le texte imprimé soit dans les sous-titres. Plus important encore, la traduction ne survient pas, comme Walter Benjamin le fait valoir, dans un " style linguistique plus élevé et plus pur», mais plutôt dans un style populaire, soulignant par làmême d'importantes différences culturelles souvent passées sous silence dans le discours dominant. Ainsi, l'article traite des représentations complexes des deux ensembles de relations dans les textes, ainsi que de la réalité tout aussi complexe de la politique américaine, en particulier après la récente élection du président Barack Obama.


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