American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene

E-Book: 209 English pages

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Price: 1000 Toman

Download: American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Katz 2007).

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.

Review

Katz [has] a firm grasp of the current state of play in the academic study of modernism and of transatlantic cultural relations in North America…. Both of these are currently growth industries, expanding sub-fields where adventurous new work is being done, and where familiar curricula and syllabi are undergoing revision. Katz ‘s project will be right at home (to steal one of his ironic tropes) in this context. I found the material… enormously impressive, and thoroughly engrossing.

—- (Brian McHale, Humanities Distinguished Professor in English, Ohio State University)

About the Author

Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, and The Poetry of Jack Spicer.