Read more
Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem is a critical and historical interpretation of "Oriental" influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's "discovery" of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry; what Emerson had termed the "language of nature". This language of nature is here shown to be a mythic conception continuous with the Renaissance idea of the language of Adam - a language in which things themselves are also signs. Analyzing and contextualizing the nineteenth-century works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Fenollosa and the twentieth-century creations of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.
List of contents
1. Introduction: the European hallucination; 2. Emerson and the language of nature; 3. Character assassination: representing Chinese in nineteenth-century linguistics; 4. Otto Jesperson and Chinese as the future of language; 5. Language in its primary use: Fenollosa and the Chinese character; Interchapter: Pound, Emerson, and the poetics of creative reading; 6. Modernising Orientalism/Orientalising modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese translation, and English-as-Chinese; 7. Seeing the world without language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American speech.
Summary
This is a critical and historical interpretation of 'Oriental' influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's 'discovery' of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry, what Emerson had termed the 'language of nature'.
