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.
Approaching Pound’s Fascism: Development of an Ideologue
This chapter analyzes some of the longer-term drivers for Pound’s turn toward European fascism between the wars, especially with respect to his artistic experiences and interest in ‘social credit’ economics. Critical discussions of Pound’s work on the ‘Malatesta Cantos’ is presented for its influence upon his later politics, as is his Fascist ‘conversion’ during winter 1932–33 — culminating with his only meeting with Mussolini on 30 January 1933 — reflected in his 1935 (but written in February 1933) study, Jefferson and/or Mussolini.
Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs
“Literature can turn language, for the moment at least, against the sentence of death.” Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.