Literary Criticism

Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and American Modernism

By Therese Cregan | 0 comments |

This essay investigates the complex duality of the concept of modernity as both lived experience and artistic tenet. It explores Modernism as a socio-economic force and as a literary movement which helped to create the historical image of the early twentieth century. As representatives of American Modernism, Ezra Pound and W. C. Williams expound the Modernist incorporation of aspects of the ironic and the ambiguous, promoting a state of ‘constant flickering’ or a suspension of resolution; offering not explanations or reassurances but contradictions and unsynthesized dialectics. By examining the dynamics of poetic and socio-economic change reflected in the work of Pound and Williams, this essay provides a useful theoretical snapshot of American Modernism, in both an historical and literary-historical context. While the focus of the work is Pound and Williams’ figurations of these ideas, this paper also incorporates several other influences through both American and world poetics.

Read the full paper...

“The Fragile Web”:

The Reconstruction of the Past in A Midwife’s Tale

By Holly Kent | 0 comments |

By Investigating various cinematic and authorial techniques, this article strives to discover the problematic issue of reconstructing an otherwise fluid past. Because the past is disjointed, subjective, and often goes ‘officially’ unwritten, both the necessity for imaginative (re)construction as well as extensive academic historical research are aligned to show the tensions between a ‘true’ and a ‘factual’ historical representation. Moreover, tensions created the structure of A Midwifes Tale and shifting means of representation are examined in an effort to expose the mandate behind the film’s portrayal. Kent also further emphasizes the difficulties of constructing the narrative of the oppressed (female) subject, and argues that A Midwife’s Tale exhibits an uneasy tension between the filmmakers’ desire to represent the disjointed, subjective process by which history is created, and to produce a powerfully appealing, seemingly authentic visual reconstruction of the past.

Read the full paper...