Papers by Christopher Bush
A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, 2016
Futures of Comparative Literature, 2017
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2017
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, 2022
Who were Eliot's contemporaries? Beginning about two decades ago, now-classic works such as Micha... more Who were Eliot's contemporaries? Beginning about two decades ago, now-classic works such as Michael North's Reading 1922 (1999) and David Chinitz's T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003) reminded us that in whatever senses Eliot might have been a contemporary of Baudelaire or Dante, he was also a contemporary of Marie Lloyd and Langston Hughes. More generally, the "expansive" character of the new modernist studies has revised and enriched the historical horizons within which Eliot's work is read, allowing us to think of 1922 as not only the annus mirabilis of a certain Anglophone modernism, but also the year of, for example, César Vallejo's Trilce or Mário de Andrade's Paulicéia Desvairada ["Hallucinated City"]. In all these ways, our understanding of who Eliot's contemporaries were has moved away from the kinds of transhistorical conversations most famously associated with "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and toward a more chronologically literal sense of contemporaneity. 1 1 On the "expansive" character of the new modernist studies, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, "The New Modernist Studies," PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737-48. For a recent disciplinary history of modernist studies that gives a fair amount of weight to the New Critics' readings of Eliot, see Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The Invitation:In April 1915 a slim volume of ve... more (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)The Invitation:In April 1915 a slim volume of verse was published by Elkin Mathews in London, Cathay: For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. Ezra Pound's Cathay is just 100 years old, and we all know what it did to transform English--- language poetry (especially American). It has also generated some fine scholarship over the years- and lots of interesting disagreement. With a century of changing perspectives now behind us, wouldn't it be a good moment (however adventitious) to sit down and talk about the differences that Cathay made, and the differences between its earliest readers' responses and ours today, and other related topics?Here's what I would like to invite you to, if you like the idea: a conversation over email about Cathay, to be pursued in odd moments over the next few weeks or possibly months, following the turns of real conversation. At some point I would then edit it down and send it to each of you for final approval and revisions. What do you think? A little hundredth---birthday party for the slim khaki---colored volume.The Conversation:Haun Saussy: Everyone acknowledges that the appearance in 1915 of Cathay did something to change the style and manner of American poetry- and over the years, English poetry too. Just what that "something" was we might want to spend some time trying to pin down; also how it happened, how the Imagist idea of what a poem is took root and found partisans. It is astonishing that these changes should have begun with a translation from a language, Chinese, that had done very little to affect English writing up to then. A language, too, that the "translator" (a two---headed prodigy, Fenollosa---Pound) did not quite know (Pound knowing less than Fenollosa at this point, Fenollosa largely dependent on his Japanese intermediaries). Now reorientations in literary style and sensibility often come as a result of translations. As Pound himself observed, most innovations in English verse have come about as a result of "steals from the French." But usually the precondition of such an effect is hundreds of years of close contact between the languages involved (at literary and everyday levels). The literatures of England have been mediating Latin since the time of Caedmon, French since 1066, Italian since Chaucer, and so forth. Chinese poetry was an unknown in 1915, and it is astonishing to see it taking in short order the role of a model for what modern poetry ought to be. How could we account for this prodigious irruption, made through one slender volume of short poems in the second year of a terrible war?Marjorie Perloff: I think the "prodigious irruption" took place in response to the maudlin verses of the Georgian poets who were Pound's contemporaries in the England of 1915. Here's an average one by Frank Prewett:To My Mother in Canada, from Sick---Bed in ItalyDear mother, from the sure sun and warm seasOf Italy, I, sick, remember nowWhat sometimes is forgot in times of ease,Our love, the always felt but unspoken vow.So send I beckoning hands from here to there,And kiss your black once, now white thin---grown hairAnd your stooped small shoulder and pinched brow.Here, mother, there is sunshine every day;It warms the bones and breathes upon the heart;But you I see out---plod a little way,Bitten with cold; your cheeks and fingers smart.Would you were here, we might in temples lie,And look from azure into azure sky,And paradise achieve, slipping death''s part.But now 'tis time for sleep: I think no speechThere needs to pass between us what we mean,For we soul---venturing mingle each with each.So, mother, pass across the world unseenAnd share in me some wished---for dream in you;For so brings destiny her pledges true,The mother withered, in the son grown green. …
Verge: Studies in Global Asias
The conceit of a "critical renga" was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo S... more The conceit of a "critical renga" was loosely inspired by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson's 1969 quadrilingual experiment in poetic composition Renga, itself loosely modeled on the Japanese poetic genre of that name. This form of "linked verse" became a major literary genre in Japan in the fourteenth century. Starting from an opening hokku of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables (this is the origin of the haiku), a group of poets would take turns composing the next link in their chain, each alternating between fourteen and seventeen syllables, with each contributor responding only to the immediately preceding set of verses. 1 A quite complex set of rules developed over time, guiding both the particulars of any set of verses and the relationship between them in the composition as a whole (which could run to one hundred or even one thousand sets of verses). The goal was to try out a form of critical writing that would be a bit more social, more interactive, and more improvisatory than is typically the case with academic writing. At the same time, we wanted to foreground the constructed character of the connections that constitute a field. As a practical matter, we decided that instead of a single chain (which would have taken too long to complete), we would have two separate strands that would meet. Each contributor saw all the previous contributions in the chain and was encouraged to dialogue with any or all of them. We then decided to take advantage of this double-stranded structure by
Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art, 2013
Why Not Compare? mong the diverse range of essays gathered in the New Literary History special is... more Why Not Compare? mong the diverse range of essays gathered in the New Literary History special issue on comparativity, one theme stands out consistently: the dangers, even the violence, of comparison. Even those who argue in favor of comparison, in one sense or another, feel obliged to do so against an implicit consensus that comparison is, to quote Felski and Friedman's introduction, "a homogenizing process rooted in the encyclopedic ambitions and evolutionary models of nineteenth-century thought-an approach that distorts the uniqueness of the objects being compared, reduces them to variants on a common standard, and relies on a downgrading of certain cultures in relation to others. " 1 Comparison is suspect because it was, and perhaps remains, a central intellectual mechanism of centuries of Eurocentric knowledge production and is thereby complicit with the epistemology of racism, imperialism, and sexism. Indeed, even to the extent that we can imagine its operations independent of this history, comparison as such is suspect because it sacrifices difference to a sameness knowledge supposedly requires. Not only was comparison put to bad uses, but comparison as such is bad.
[Uncorrected proof of article that appears in _Pacific Rim Modernism_ Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Swo... more [Uncorrected proof of article that appears in _Pacific Rim Modernism_ Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, and Steven Yao, eds.
Uploads
Papers by Christopher Bush