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American modernism's expatriate scene : the labour of translation / Daniel Katz

Author
Katz, Daniel, 1938-
Published
Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2007]
Copyright Date
©2007
Physical Description
1 online resource (viii, 197 pages).
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Series
Language Note
English.
Contents
Native well being: Henry James and the "cosmopolite" -- The mother's tongue: seduction, authenticity, and interference in The ambassadors -- Ezra Pound's American scenes: Henry James and the labour of translation -- Pound and translation: ideogram and the vulgar tongue -- Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and the American language -- Jack Spicer's After Lorca: translation as delocalization -- Homecomings: the poet's prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer.
Summary
This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy which 'fatherlands' and 'mother tongues' are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and 'nativist' obsessions with the purity of the 'mother tongue.' At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation, and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of Spicer's peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism, and modernism.
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Genre(s)
ISBN
9780748630875 (electronic bk.)
0748630872 (electronic bk.)
1281251917
9781281251916
9780748652006
0748652000
9786611251918
661125191X
9780748625260 (hbk.)
0748625267 (hbk.)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-192) and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 43166835