Orientalism, modernism, and the American poem
By: Robert Kern.
Series: Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ;; 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Cambridge [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
Subjects: American poetry -- Chinese influences.; Exoticism in literature.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; American poetry -- History and criticism.; Linguistics in literature.; Chinese language -- Influence on foreign languages.; Languages in contact.; China -- In literature.
Description: Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem is a critical and historical interpretation of "Oriental" influences on American modernist poetry. Kern equates Fenollosa and Pound's "discovery" of Chinese writing with the American pursuit of a natural language for poetry; what Emerson had termed the "language of nature." This language of nature is here shown to be a mythic conception continuous with the Renaissance idea of the language of Adam - a language in which things themselves are also signs.

Analyzing and contextualizing the nineteenth-century works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernest Fenollosa and the twentieth-century creations of Ezra Pound and Gary Snyder, Kern sheds light on the three contemporary nexuses of his search: the cultural study of Orientalism and the West, the evolution of Indo-European linguistic theory, and the intellectual tradition of American modernist poetry.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.