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.
Make It Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound
Hollis Frampton's films have often been characterized as the afterimages of literary modernism. While the material and linguistic concerns of his early films as well as his time spent visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital attest to the impact that modernist poetics had on him, the grand finale of his career—the cycle of films that comprise Magellan—marked his most significant departure from these original influences. Considering Magellan in relation to Pound's Cantos illuminates the competing modernisms, both literary and cinematic, in Frampton's late work. In his depiction of two simultaneous voyages—one through the world and one through the history of film—Frampton counterintuitively suggests that a modernism uniquely conceived for film can only be realized after establishing a tradition to renovate: film can finally make it new only through becoming old.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.