Aesthetics at the limits of the nation: Kant, pound, and the Saturday review

American Literature

Volumn 76, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 525-547

  Dimock, Wai Chee ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950429835     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-76-3-525     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Bruce Ackerman, "The Rise of World Constitutionalism, " Virginia Law Review 83 (May 1997): 771-97
2. and Jürgen Habermas, Postnational Constellation, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001)
3. While Habermas is primarily interested in the postnational constellation as democratic politics, other theorists approach it as a globalized imagination; see, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996)
4. Habermas, Postnational Constellation, 69-70
5. Etienne Balibar, "What Is a War?" public lecture, School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, 23 June 2003. For Balibar's analysis of nationalism and the nation-state, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 37-68, 86-106
6. Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 2003)
7. The past five years have witnessed a resurgent interest in the aesthetic. However, there has been no attempt to link it to the idea of a global civil society; see, for instance, Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2000)
8. Gerard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999)
9. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999)
10. James Soderholm, ed., Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in the Age of Cultural Studies (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1997)
11. See also the slightly earlier volume Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994)
12. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 3, 2
13. As a subject-centered theory, Critique of Judgment will always be of marginal interest to those who see aesthetics as object-centered. For a lucid critique of Kant from the latter standpoint, see Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, 61-72
14. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 129
15. For a discussion of Kant's federalist conception of world government, see Carl Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948)
16. Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Kant's Political Writings, 93
17. Hannah Arendt, untitled lectures, in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 7, 31, 19, 61. Arendt delivered the Kant lectures at the New School for Social Research during the fall semester of 1970. She presented an earlier version of them at the University of Chicago in 1964. She was scheduled to lecture again on Kant at the New School in 1976, but her death came in December 1975. These lectures were in preparation for Judging, which was to have been the third and concluding volume of The Life of the Mind
18. For a lucid and respectful dissent from Arendt, see Patrick Riley, "Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth, and Politics," in Essays on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Howard Williams (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1992), 305-23
19. Arendt is not the only one to see Critique of Judgment as a theory about a global humanity. In a brief but suggestive volume, Dieter Henrich has also argued that the Third Critique grounds a theory of international human rights. Unlike Adrendt, Henrich makes his argument by linking Critique of Judgment not to Perpetual Peace but to Critique of Pure Reason; see Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992)
20. See also Mark F. Franke, Global Limits: Immanuel Kant, International Relations, and Critique of World Politics (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2001)
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafne/Macmillan, 1951), 75. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as CJ
22. Ernst Cassirer, "Critical Idealism as a Philosophy of Culture," in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 88
23. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 297-307
24. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 96
25. Robert Hillyer, "Treason's Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award," Saturday Review of Literature, 11 June 1949, 10. Further references will be cited parenthetically as "TSF."
26. Norman Cousins and Harrison Smith, "Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award," Saturday Review of Literature, 11 June 1949, 20
27. Robert Hillyer, "Poetry's New Priesthood," Saturday Review, 18 June 1949,7
28. further references will be cited parenthetically as "PNP." "A Glossary of the New Criticism" was published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, November 1948-January 1949, 7-9, 38
29. See Marjorie Perloff, "Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Isolationism: Contextualizing the case of EP," Paideuma 16 (winter 1987): 7-21. As Perloff shows, the intellectuals affiliated with the Partisan Review were almost uniformly against the war
30. Walter Benjamin, epilogue to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 241
31. Russell Berman, "The Aestheticization of Politics: Walter Benjamin on Fascism and the Avant-Garde," Stanford Italian Review 8, nos. 1-2 (1990): 35-52, especially 49
32. See, for instance, George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 45-54, 183-98
33. Mary Ann Frese Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001)
34. and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993)
35. Resolution brought to the House floor, April 1937; Congressional Record, 21 December 1937
36. quoted in Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 16, 18
37. The Committee on Un-American Activities actually made an appearance in the Saturday Review at the same time as the Bollingen controversy. John S. Wood, chair of the committee, had sent a letter to school superintendents to obtain a list of textbooks for inspection. The Saturday Review was firmly opposed to this action; see "Speaking of Tests," Saturday Review of Literature, 9 July 1949, 22
38. Library of Congress Information Office, Press Release No. 590, "Statement of the Committee of the Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters in Reply to Published Criticisms of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry," 10
39. Canto LXXIV, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 445
40. See Richard B. Lyttle, Il Duce: The Rise and Fall of Benito Mussolini (New York: Atheneum, 1987), 97-98
41. For Mussolini's roots in Italian socialism (specifically, the syndicalism of Georges Sorel), see A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979)
42. Gregor draws on the monumental archival work of Renzo De Felice, the foremost Italian historian of fascism, whose eight-volume biography of Mussolini has unfortunately not been translated into English. For a short introduction to De Felice's work, see Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice; An Interview with Michael A. Ledeen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1976)
43. Pound wrote for A. R. Orage's the New Age from November 1911 to January 1921. For a detailed account of Pound's tie to British socialism and its legacy in his admiration for Mussolini, see Wendy Stallard Flory The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 42-130
44. Leon Surette, "Ezra Pound and British Radicalism," English Studies in Canada 9, no. 4 (1983): 435-51
45. and Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 17-50
46. Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (New York: Liveright, 1935), ix
47. I should point out, however, that Mussolini did have excellent press in the United States all through the 1920s; see John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), 3-73
48. Pound, Canto LXXIV, The Cantos, 446
49. Philip Kuberski has also noted the importance of Mussolini as a poetic precursor for Pound; see A Calculus of Ezra Pound (Gainsville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1992), 16-18
50. For an account of the affinity between Pound and Mussolini based on a theory of translation as well as a theory of economics, see Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 16-59
51. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 48, 366
52. Pound, Radio Broadcast #6, in Ezra Pound Speaking, 26
53. Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, introductory note to The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (1917; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1959). In 1913, following Fenollosa's sudden death in 1908, Fenollosa's widow gave all her husband's manuscripts to Pound: "eight notebooks in all," according to Hugh Kenner, "plus the volumes of notes on Noh drama, plus the books in which he was drafting his lectures on Chinese poetics, plus a sheaf of loose sheets" (The Pound Era [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971], 198)