[log in to unmask],.Internet writes: >Dear Pound scholars, >I have been asked to edit a special, American number of the British >annual, >*Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism*. The topic will be Raymond >Williams and Modernism, and this special issue will be *Keywords* 4. >Papers >might either construe Williams' work in the context of modernist >critical >activity, or take up modernist activity (or some single work) in terms >of >Williams' critical precepts. I'd be pleased to see someone develop >relations >between Poundian notions of "sagetrieb" or "culture" and Williams's >notion >of "Structures of feeling," but I'm open to any interesting proposals. >Anyone interested in contributing should send an abstract of >approximately >250-300 words to me, by e-mail preferably, to the following address: ><[log in to unmask]> . My deadline for completed essays will be in >December, but I'd like to see proposals as soon as possible. Dear Michael, I'm very intrigued by this possibility, because Raymond Williams had a major formative influence on my thinking, from 1959, when I first read Culture and Society, through the 1980s. His books are all still lined up on my shelves, although I haven't spent a lot of time with them for the last decade. But I'd like to go back to Williams, to assess what is still alive and what is dated in his thinking. I've long been inclined (see my essay on "Pound and Fascism" from 1983) to read Pound's political/social thinking as a form of Ruskinism gone wrong; and I certainly see Williams as carrying forward the tradition of Ruskin and Morris (and, a little later, R.H. Tawney) into the 20th century. Putting Pound next to Williams, I see, in effect, a confrontation between "right" and "left" Ruskinites. I believe that it was Alexandre Kojeve who described World War II as a battle between the Left Hegelians and the Right Hegelians. That may have been true in continental Europe, but what Hegel represented for the continent, Ruskin represented for the Anglo-American world: he detected a rupture between the economy (the means of production) and the culture (the symbol systems in terms of which we try to understand the world), and he saw this rupture as a crisis that undermined any effort to achieve "unity of being" (Yeats). The "left" Ruskinites have insisted that this rupture can be healed only by addressing the structural injustices created by the new economy, and by developing an educational system that will make available to all people the richer structures of feeling nurtured by a genuine literacy. On the other hand, the "right" Ruskinites, terrified by the Rise of the Masses (Ortega y Gasset), have sought to create a citadel in which culture will be protected from the rising tide of barbarism. In some respects, Pound is a typical Right Ruskinite. Like other "high" Modernists, he spoke with scorn of the Great Unwashed. But the picture is complicated by the fact that he was an American with strong populist instincts. In the United States during the 19th Century, "culture," in the Arnoldian sense, was in effect equated with the genteel tradition, and Pound, like other American modernists, was fiercely critical of that tradition. (See Lentricchia on the responses of Frost, Stevens, Pound, and Eliot to this tradition.) At the same time, although an ideological anti-Semitism becomes a major force in his thinking only in the late 1930s, Pound was, like Eliot and Stevens and other American modernist writers, acutely aware from childhood that his Anglo-Saxon America was being engulfed by waves of immigrants. His reaction, on the level of pure feeling, was a deep discomfort, which by the time of the Rome radio broadcasts became a conviction that the "real" America of Jefferson and Adams had been destroyed in the aftermath of the Civil War. Pound resolved this contradiction (he loathed the genteel postures of American Anglo-American culture, but he found it impossible to identify with the emergent multi-cultural America) by escaping to Europe, and by erecting in his mind an idealized heritage of European culture that had survived down through the centuries (Eliot helped him here).Positioning himself within the European (and specifically British) cultural scene of the 1910s and 1920s, Pound picked up on many Ruskinian themes, through Orage and the Guild Socialist group. (Both Tawney and Major Douglas emerged out of this group, the first moving left and the second moving right.) But as an expatriate American, Pound was never forced to define the relationship between culture and politics, as they were evolving in Britain itself: that is, he did not need to work through his relationship with the British people and their complex class fissures and loyalties, simply because he was not British. Thus Pound's cultural politics, in Britain until 1920 as in Italy later, has a peculiarly abstract character: he never makes the link, absolutely central to Williams, between culture and society. As an American, Pound could make that link in an effective way only in America. Not until his St. Elizabeths years was he in a position to make such a link, and then he allied himself with the most reactionary strains in American nativism. But even at this stage of his life, he was still, in however deluded a way, pursuing a Ruskinian vision of a world in which the craftsman would own the tools of his trade and would control the fruits of his labor. Pound never found a way of making the link between culture and society in a way that would allow him to participate effectively in the political life of any community. Here a contrast with Tawney, who became the moral and intellectual mentor of the British Labour party, becomes useful. Was Williams himself able to play a similar role? Certainly he aspired to be such a public intellectual, in the tradition of Tawney, but I don't know enough about his career to say whether he succeeded. End of abstract. Obviously, I'm here thinking aloud, so this is a bit formless. As I wrote, for example, I became intrigued by the possibility of putting Eliot into the picture too, as another expatriate Ruskinian. But what most deeply impressed me about Williams was his ability to think historically. I read The Long Revolution in the 1970s or early 1980s, and the vision he there unfolds has sustained me in some dark hours. (But the long revolution seems to be stalled at the moment. Can Nader restart it?) I think that we need to put Pound, and espcially his politics, into an historical context, and that's what I would try to do in this essay. I might mention that I also have a half-completed essay on Pound's relationship with Henry and Brooks Adams that pursues some of these same themes. In a pinch, perhaps I could try to finish this essay and adapt it for your purposes. Well, let me know what you think. Best wishes, Burt Hatlen