Search

This essay examines Ezra Pound's behind-the-scenes control of the little review Four Pages, which ran for fifteen issues from 1948 to 1951. After his return to the United States in 1945 to face charges of treason, Pound was declared mentally incompetent and institutionalized in amental hospital in the nation's capital. With his publishers attempting to rehabilitate Pound's public standing by spotlighting his purely "literary" efforts, Pound had to resort to anonymous publication to continue to have a say on contemporary matters. This essay shows how Pound essentially created and edited a little review to have a venue that pushed his social and political ideas at a time when doing so openly was problematic for legal and political reasons. The use of anonymity as a writer and editor was part of the wider "literary camouflage" that Four Pages engaged in to advance Pound's wider cultural and political agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the ill-fated 1922 Congress of Paris, an international conference organized by Andre Breton, was to diagnose the sources of the "modern spirit." Although the congress had ambitious international goals, it was brought down by a remark with xenophobic connotations. Largely remembered today as the death knell of Paris Dada--the public fight between Tristan Tzara and Breton meant not only that the congress never took place but also that Paris Dada was dissolved--the congress's failure stemmed from the tensions involved in self-consciously defining modernism. Arguing that ambivalence over the concept shaped the main participants' understanding of the congress, I read the congress as a concrete manifestation of the impulse to federate the arts in post-World War I France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]