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...
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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'. This language of nature is here shown to be a mythic conception continuous with the Renaissance idea of the language of Adam - a language lacking any difference between what it is and what it means. Through analysing and contextualising 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
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015)
1. Introduction: The European Hallucination -- 2. Emerson and the Language of Nature -- 3. Character Assassination: Representing Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Linguistics -- 4. Otto Jespersen 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. Modernizing Orientalism/Orientalizing Modernism: Ezra Pound, Chinese Translation, and English-as-Chinese -- 7. Seeing the World without Language: Gary Snyder and Chinese as American Speech
