Emeritus Professor K K Ruthven - Ezra Pound As Literary Critic

General Editor: Christopher Norris,

University of Wales,

College of Cardiff

A.J.GREIMAS AND THE NATURE OF MEANING

Ronald Schleifer

CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL

Robert Sullivan

FIGURING LACAN

CRITICISM AND THE CULTURAL UNCONSCIOUS

Juliet Flower MacCannell

HAROLD BLOOM

TOWARDS HISTORICAL RHETORICS

Peter de Bolla

F. R. LEAVIS

Michael Bell

POSTMODERN BRECHT

A RE-PRESENTATION

Elizabeth Wright

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Ronald Bogue

ECSTASIES OF ROLAND BARTHES

Mary Wiseman

JULIA KRISTEVA

John Lechte

GEOFFREY HARTMAN

CRITICISM AS ANSWERABLE STYLE

G.Douglas Atkins

INTRODUCING LYOTARD

Bill Readings

K.K.Ruthven

First published 1990

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

1990 K.K. Ruthven

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,

including photocopying and recording, or in any information

storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the

publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ruthven, K.K. (Kenneth Knowles)

Ezra Pound as literary critic. (Critics of the twentieth century).

1. Literature. Criticism. Pound, Ezra, 18851972

I. Title II. Series 801. 95092

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data also available

ISBN 0-203-00900-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-20599-5 (Glassbook Format)

DOI: 10.4324/9780203009000

To Marion Campbell

The twentieth century has produced a remarkable number of gifted and innovative literary critics. Indeed it could be argued that some of the finest literary minds of the age have turned to criticism as the medium best adapted to their complex and speculative range of interests. This has sometimes given rise to regret among those who insist on a clear demarcation between creative (primary) writing on the one hand, and critical (secondary) texts on the other. Yet this distinction is far from self-evident. It is coming under strain at the moment as novelists and poets grow increasingly aware of the conventions that govern their writing and the challenge of consciously exploiting and subverting those conventions. And the critics for their partsome of them at leastare beginning to question their traditional role as humble servants of the literary text with no further claim upon the reader's interest or attention. Quite simply, there are texts of literary criticism and theory that, for various reasonsstylistic complexity, historical influence, range of intellectual commandcannot be counted a mere appendage to those other primary texts.

Of course, there is a logical puzzle here, since (it will be argued) literary criticism would never have come into being, and could hardly exist as such, were it not for the body of creative writings that provide its raison dtre. But this is not quite the kind of knockdown argument that it might appear at first glance. For one thing, it conflates some very different orders of priority, assuming that literature always comes first (in the sense that Greek tragedy had to exist before Aristotle could formulate its rules), so that literary texts are for that very reason possessed of superior value. And this argument would seem to find commonsense support in the difficulty of thinking what literary criticism could be if it seriously renounced all sense of the distinction between literary and critical texts. Would it not then find itself in the unfortunate position of a discipline that had willed its own demise by declaring its subject non-existent?

But these objections would only hit their mark if there were indeed a special kind of writing called literature whose difference from other kinds of writing was enough to put criticism firmly in its place. Otherwise there is nothing in the least self-defeating or paradoxical about a discourse, nominally that of literary criticism, that accrues such interest on its own account as to force some fairly drastic rethinking of its proper powers and limits. The act of crossing over from commentary to literatureor of simply denying the difference between thembecomes quite explicit in the writing of a critic like Geoffrey Hartman. But the signs are already there in such classics as William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1928), a text whose transformative influence on our habits of reading must surely be ranked with the great creative moments of literary modernism. Only on the most dogmatic view of the difference between literature and criticism could a work like Seven Types be counted generically an inferior, sub-literary species of production. And the same can be said for many of the critics whose writings and influence this series sets out to explore.

Some, like Empson, are conspicuous individuals who belong to no particular school or larger movement. Others, like the Russian Formalists, were part of a communal enterprise and are therefore best understood as representative figures in a complex and evolving dialogue. Then again there are cases of collective identity (like the so-called Yale deconstructors) where a mythical group image is invented for largely polemical purposes. (The volumes in this series on Hartman and Bloom should help to dispel the idea that Yale deconstruction is anything more than a handy device for collapsing differences and avoiding serious debate.) So there is no question of a series format or house-style that would seek to reduce these differences to a blandly homogeneous treatment. One consequence of recent critical theory is the realisation that literary texts have no self-sufficient or autonomous meaning, no existence apart from their after-life of changing interpretations and values. And the same applies to those critical texts whose meaning and significance are subject to constant shifts and realignments of interest. This is not to say that trends in criticism are just a matter of intellectual fashion or the merry-go-round of rising and falling reputations. But it is important to grasp how complex are the forcesthe conjunctions of historical and cultural motivethat affect the first reception and the subsequent fortunes of a critical text. This point has been raised into a systematic programme by critics like Hans-Robert Jauss, practitioners of so-called reception theory as a form of historical hermeneutics. The volumes in this series will therefore be concerned not only to expound what is of lasting significance but also to set these critics in the context of present-day argument and debate. In some cases (as with Walter Benjamin) this debate takes the form of a struggle for interpretative power among disciplines with sharply opposed ideological viewpoints. Such controversies cannot simply be ignored in the interests of achieving a clear and balanced account. They point to unresolved tensions and problems which are there in the critic's work as well as in the rival appropriative readings. In the end there is no way of drawing a neat methodological line between intrinsic questions (what the critic really thought) and those other, supposedly extrinsic concerns that have to do with influence and reception history.