Title: Orientalism, modernism, and the American poem
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: American poetry, Linguistics in literature, Influence on foreign languages, History and criticism, Exoticism in literature, Modernism (Literature), Languages in contact, In literature, Chinese influences, Chinese language, American poetry, history and criticism, American literature, foreign influences
Places: United States, China
LC classification: PS159.C5 K47 1996