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Summary
Summary
The "homemade world" Hugh Kenner describes exists alongside the world of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. While they were laying the international foundations of literary modernism, another modernism far more specifically American was being born in the work of William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
An ingenious -- more than ingenious -- gloss of the Daedalus myth that locates a field of reference for American modernism that would be trickier, certainly duller, to map by more specific means. It was no accident that Pound and Williams identified their art as ""making:"" another species of making is technology, and technology, like the art of Pound and Williams, is also die-cut American and supremely arbitrary. The Daedalian aspect Kenner sees in both has to do with the inevitable escalation of inventions, each one compelling the next toward the limits of possibility -- New York City, the modern American poem, Icarus into the drink. This is not, however, a thesis book: for one thing, the myth is teasingly applied to Kenner's moderns, with their sense of words as raw material, their understanding that literary ""norms are not imposed by history, they are elected."" Another reason is that this attitude toward language and the past is the only thing that unites the group, and tenuously at that. Pressed further, definition dissolves into mud, or -- as Kenner pursues it -- breaks up into an array of distinct but arbitrary aesthetics, a democracy of elected norms, each of which requires a special mode of reading and appreciation. These he supplies, with an elegance and sense of the appropriate as well as wit. Novelists and poets both (Fitzgerald to Faulkner; as different as Stevens, Williams, Zukofsky) are roundly handled by this best rounded critic, and they will be ever the better read for it whether or not their enterprise was inarguably doomed or the ""Red Wheel Barrow"" was really an equivalent of the Wright Brothers' ""Flyer. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Kirkus Review
An ingenious -- more than ingenious -- gloss of the Daedalus myth that locates a field of reference for American modernism that would be trickier, certainly duller, to map by more specific means. It was no accident that Pound and Williams identified their art as ""making:"" another species of making is technology, and technology, like the art of Pound and Williams, is also die-cut American and supremely arbitrary. The Daedalian aspect Kenner sees in both has to do with the inevitable escalation of inventions, each one compelling the next toward the limits of possibility -- New York City, the modern American poem, Icarus into the drink. This is not, however, a thesis book: for one thing, the myth is teasingly applied to Kenner's moderns, with their sense of words as raw material, their understanding that literary ""norms are not imposed by history, they are elected."" Another reason is that this attitude toward language and the past is the only thing that unites the group, and tenuously at that. Pressed further, definition dissolves into mud, or -- as Kenner pursues it -- breaks up into an array of distinct but arbitrary aesthetics, a democracy of elected norms, each of which requires a special mode of reading and appreciation. These he supplies, with an elegance and sense of the appropriate as well as wit. Novelists and poets both (Fitzgerald to Faulkner; as different as Stevens, Williams, Zukofsky) are roundly handled by this best rounded critic, and they will be ever the better read for it whether or not their enterprise was inarguably doomed or the ""Red Wheel Barrow"" was really an equivalent of the Wright Brothers' ""Flyer. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.