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Global Poetics and State-Sponsored Transnationalism: A Reply to Jahan Ramazani

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/alh/ajj021

1468-4365

William J. Maxwell,

Political theory and Gramsci

Back in the twentieth century, when modernist studies were as high as their object and the upper decks of the Cunard Line still served as the chronotope of transatlantic modernity, the nation-hopping of modern Anglophone poetry was no state secret. To take just one 600-page example, Hugh Kenner’s proclamation of The Pound Era in 1971 widely broadcast news of a poet-managed “supranational movement called International Modernism” (59). By the time I declared an English major in the early 1980s, American modernist pedagogy peaked in guided tours of the multinational vortex of The Waste Land , Mauberly , and The Cantos (the equally pedantic worldliness of Libretto for the Republic of Liberia then came nowhere near the syllabus). The whole of the modern poetry survey confided a political moral somehow evaded in the rest of the curriculum: it is neither sweet nor glorious to die for the abstractions of one’s country. I found myself confused, then, by Jahan Ramazani’s opening suggestion that academic keepers of modern English-language verse resist our moment’s eager transnationalizing of the humanities due to a settled “disciplinary paradigm” invented by German pre-Romanticism and cemented by Cold War Americanism. Is the high-church cosmopolitanism of the old modernist studies, spellbound by world war, moveable feasts, and the cunning of exile, so easily separated from its Eurail pass and sent home packing? Does the undoubted Eurocentrism of a Kenner annul his pretracing of what Ramazani calls “[g]lobe-traversing influences, energies, and resistances,” and did this Eurocentrism fail to grind an internationalist lens as “particularized”—if not nearly as democratic—as that which Ramazani now advocates? Meanwhile, absent a case for the persistence of the lyric’s special affection for the genius loci , it is hard to grasp why poetics remains unusually wary of transnationalism’s millennial call. Work on narrative has more readily globalized itself over the past decade, but such work seems no less subject to that disciplinary paradigm yoking literary education to national aspiration. Ramazani’s introduction thus testifies to the difficulty of situating the exceptional “mononationalism” of current modern poetry studies while stinting evidence of the subfield’s prior, precocious globetrotting.