Aiiie! My hard drive!
Seriously, though:
Dave --
I think my experiences might be somewhat similar to yours; the
Cantos just don't seem to want to slip neatly in to undergraduate work
-- either you end up making it all the way through the criticism to
find that the life is drained out of the text, or you begin somewhere
that makes complete sense to you but either fails to sustain itself
over a longer period of time, or fails to make any sense to the people
responsible for advising you.
One thing that might help prevent reinvention of the wheel, or
that might help define "problems" to solve within your thesis
statement -- angles of attack -- is to look at similar efforts
beforehand. Not to do a fullblown comparison, but perhaps over a
weekend when you're not hitting the "primary" texts, to look at some
of the criticism of, say, Joyce's Finnegans Wake (which Pound,
incidentally, disliked -- Joyce returning the complement to the
Cantos), or Berryman's Dream Songs. Both of these are related in a
number of ways to the Cantos, and, in my beyond humble and to the
other side opinion, can shed a lot of light on each other's
structure. How Berryman intertwines personal experience with
historical events, for example. Certaintly, there are a great many
differences between the texts, but, speaking from experience, the FW
and the DS seemed to work well at "shaking up" critical notions of the
texts.
Let me know if this is useful/interesting; I've done a lot of
thinking myself about the relations between the three texts mentioned
above, and would welcome the chance to dicuss connections with you or
other folks on the list.
-- Simon DeDeo
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Sorry about the odd formatting -- strange emacs things...
> Dan: You wrote: "In other words, the thesis statement you give
> below sounds too general, or like rediscovery of the wheel. Perhaps
> you can refine it" . . . . tell me about it, I've got at least six
> books on the table on the topic of organization of _Cantos_; the
> theme seems quite done already. At present it doesn't seem like
> there is a "new" angle at all. But on the plus side, I've got about
> 10 months to complete the thing (and its an undergrad project --
> meaning they're taking it easy). What interests me about
> organization is the controversy; T. S. Eliot said: "That never
> worries me, and I do not believe that I care. I know that Pound has
> a scheme and a kind of philosophy behind it; it is quite enough for
> me that he thinks he knows what he is doing." Plenty of other
> critics become fully irate at the notion of finding order to
> _Cantos_. Even in responding to my little blip there seems to be a
> variety of degrees of opinion as to how much intentional structure
> there was / is in it. I don't think that I plan to find a structure
> which has never been seen, but I would like to accurately explore
> what IS there. Over the months, I may develop a "new" angle, but
> now I've got to produce a draft of a prospectus. Several critics
> have objectified "Odysseus in Hades" (I - XXX) as a thematic and
> structural introduction for all of the following Cantos wherein (I'm
> gleening from different sources) the concept of the "subject rhyme"
> is introduced. how's ". . . mimicking the seeming spontaneity" of
> real-world events sound, instead of transpiration? what's wrong
> with "transpiration"? Anyway, thanks to all respondents. I'll be
> back. Dave Centrone
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