Been reading all the discussions about ep & fascism
for the last six months and watched the flareup the
past month or so. Now that the flame's dying down
again I'd like to throw on a little kerosene.
 
Though the topic matters to me greatly, I don't get
anything from most of the discussions on this list.
Seems to me
 they suffer from too much categorical thinking, much
of it moralizing in the sanctimonious american
 way. First the scholar places Pound in the vice of
the category, then s/he hammers him. What in the
sainted devil's name is the point?
 
What i would like to hear, and don't hear, is:
 
1. Interrogation of the categories, Fascist (big -f or
little), anti-Semite, etc.
2. Contextualization. What is the ongoing discourse
which give rise to P's words and to which they
respond? Redman in <EP & Italian Fascism> showed us
how this could be done.
3. And historicization that links the present to the
past.
 
A proposal: A few years ago --1996?--there were some
fine pieces on P & Fascism/anti-Semitism by
Chalres Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, and others. I
think the items are still out there on the Buffalo
poetics list.
 
Would it be ok for me to download a few of these
articles and send them to our p-list in the hopes that
they would improve our discussions? Some will have
already read them. Many others, i think, will have
not.
 
Otherwise, we continue to go round the same muddy
track, beating the same dead horse--pick your
metaphor-- with no sense of what is the live issue and
what is the dead. We don't approach the level of
discussion of the Buffalo list in 1996. Isn't
scholarship supposed to be cumulative?
 
When i ask would it be ok, i mean would it be w/in
web protocol to borrow from Peter to instruct Paul?
 
Wayne
 
 
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