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Utopia Interrupted: Archipelago as Sociolyric Structure in A Draft of XXX Cantos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jennifer Scappettone
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Abstract

This essay explores Venice's recurrence as an implicit structure in Ezra Pound's Cantos, arguing that the built archipelago provides a model for the modernist text, created through engagement with recalcitrant objective dynamics opposed to their containment by an imperious subject–and proffering the canalized republic as a counter to Pound's eventual fascist city of man. The rigorous empiricism of Ruskin's Venetian histories supplies a founding set of tropes through which the fluid, fractured cityscape becomes a taunt to find material ground for historical meaning. Pound, taking up the multiple construction of Venice that haunted Ruskin, locates in it a utopian–and site–oriented–poetic structure valorizing the interstitial and thus the relational, the differential. The Venetian complex that emerges intermittently in The Cantos literalizes the unsettling of Pound's attempt to monumentalize the body politic, remaining unassimilated–and challenging to efforts to transfix any totality construed as part of the project of modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 1: Special Topics Cities , January 2007 , pp. 105 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2007

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