Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukovsky and Ezra Pound - by L Carson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The career of Ezra Pound has come to represent the political tendencies which, it has been claimed, are inherent to modernist aesthetics. But the political impulses of the modernists cannot be adequately represented by Pound's extreme positions; Pound's own political activities and commitments, in fact, do not adequately articulate the contradictory attitudes and beliefs that made them possible. By contrasting Pound's politics to the political values and beliefs of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky during the Depression, this book argues that these three very different writers share a complex set of attitudes and beliefs that are grounded in a collective social fantasy corresponding to the rise of mass consumption and the emergency of corporate social forms.

Review Quotes

The tightly focused and often elegant work is essential reading for anyone concerned with the intellectual culture of the Depression and the influence of economic philosophy on the formation and diversity of modernist poetics. Modernism/ Modernity

About the Author

Luke Carson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria.