Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy
Although the nature of Ezra Pound’s Fascism has generated substantial critical study, the mechanics of his actual engagement in the cultural projects of the Mussolini regime has received less attention. Using as its starting point lines from Pound’s controversial “Italian Canto” 72—explicit in its praise of the Fascist regime— the essay examines Pound’s correspondence with Italian cultural figures in the 1930s. Focusing on his relationship with the academic librarian Manlio Torquato Dazzi and the celebrated Futurist F.T. Marinetti, the essay demonstrates the blurred distinctions between aesthetic and political spheres in Pound’s engagements with Italian culture in the 1930s. The essay further argues that Pound’s avant-garde aesthetics and neo-platonic philosophy colored the way he engaged with the cultural projects of the regime, making his Fascism a mixture of spirituality, modernism and totalitarianism.
"To act on one's definition": Ezra Pound, Carl Schmitt, and the Poetics of Sovereignty
“I don’t believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions” (Jefferson and/ or Mussolini 33). Ezra Pound’s description of Mussolini as an “artifex”—a master craftsman or artist—encapsulates a central and longstanding problem in Pound’s work: the relationship between his avant-garde poetics and his active engagement in fascist political projects. Of course, this issue is not unique to Pound. Scholars of modernism have long debated the connection between canonical high-modernist aesthetics and the authoritarian political leanings of many of its major authors. The question still stands, however: what made fascism attractive to these authors, and what implications does this tendency toward authoritarianism have for modernist aesthetics? Specifically, what is the connection between Ezra Pound’s poetic and political activities? This essay seeks to address these questions by focusing on Pound’s inter-war nonfiction prose—specifically pieces considered to be either influential statements of modernist poetics or representative samples of his critical writing. I read these texts alongside the work of Carl Schmitt, focusing on his theory of sovereignty. After a brief summary of the theoretical debate surrounding the relationship between politics and aesthetics, I outline Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty and the relationship between a sovereign’s power and his use of language. Using Schmitt as a theoretical framework, I then turn to Pound’s early articulations of the role of the artist and the implications of that role on his creation of a paratactic poetic style. Pound continues to explore the role of the artist and the value of parataxis throughout his career, and I trace the connections between these two concerns, focusing specifically on his 1930s prose. Finally, I argue that Pound’s articulation of aesthetic problems in terms of sovereignty transitions seamlessly into his political writing and eventual support of fascist dictators like Mussolini. By using Schmitt’s work to explicate Pound’s, I also hope to demonstrate the relevance of Schmitt’s judicial theory to literary studies and provide a framework for further investigations of the political implications of modernist poetics. Throughout the essay, I will use the terms “modernism” or “canonical modernism” to denote the work of the modernist authors of Pound’s circle, including T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats, and others.2 Because of his central role in establishing canonical modernist poetics and his well-known support for Italian fascism, Pound has been at the center of the debate over the connection between aesthetic and political modernism. Some early scholarship 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 S41 R42
Philip Roth’s Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain
Philip Roth belongs to the first generation of American novelists for whom a university education in the liberal arts was the norm. This essay charts Roth’s developing acquaintance with classical literature, the starting point for Great Books courses in the 1950s, and the implications for his fiction of his understanding of the difference in scope and purpose between the two representative classical genres. It focuses on The Human Stain (2000), the novel in which he reflects most directly upon what tragedy and epic once did, and what might happen to novels if they became more like the one or the other.