Leon,

I agree that "the most difficult hermeneutic problem with the Cantos
is to identify the tone and tenor of particular passages."  And as
much as we strive for critical objectivity, as critics none of us can
help entertaining some underlying convictions about the tone and
tenor of the *whole* of the Cantos that skews our readings of
particular passages.  I doubt we are even aware how much these
convictions affect our readings.  It would take a good deal
of literary self-psychoanalysis for me to become fully aware of
my own.  This is not to say that such convictions falsify one's
readings.  They do, however, prevent us from entertaining the widest
range of hermeneutic possibilities.

==Dan

At 08:06 AM 8/29/00 -0400, you wrote:
>I'm glad, Dan, to learn that you are not blindly committed to a New Critical
>autonomous text analysis, as your previous remarks seemed to suggest. It
>seems we are pretty much on the same page so far a critical methodology is
>concerned--though you lean rather more to local context than I.
>    Louis Cabri comments are suggestive and promising. I think that the most
>difficult hermeneutic problem with the Cantos is to identify the tone and
>tenor of particular passages. Until some determination is made of where
>Pound wants to go, detailed annotative remarks do not lead us to a reading.
>Terry's monumental Companion is testimony to that circumstance. Despite it
>having resolved many of the problems of allusion, it has not produced any
>consensus about the meaning of the poem as a whole--or indeed of particular
>sections or even cantos. So far as I can see we are no nearer a consensus
>than we were when Dan Pearlman, Walter Baumann, Massimo Bacigalupo, Ronald
>Bush, and I were publishing books purporting to explain what the poem was
>about--all prior to the Companion.
>
>Leon Surette
>English Dept.
>University of Western Ontario
>London, Ont.
>N6A 3K7
>
HOME:
Dan Pearlman
102 Blackstone Blvd. #5
Providence, RI 02906
Tel.: 401 453-3027
email: [log in to unmask]
Fax: (253) 681-8518
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/

OFFICE
Department of English
University of Rhode Island
Kingston, RI 02881
Tel.: 401 874-4659