If you’re seeking four days of conference madness next April, you may be interested in the following event, which takes place in the two days preceding our own inaugural conference (the first day of which will also be held in Durham):
‘Efface the Traces!’ – Modernism and Influence
Durham University, 9-11 April 2013
‘[T]he poets of the nineties were entirely missed out of my personal history […] I never read any of these people until it was much too late for me to get anything out of them’. T.S. Eliot, letter to Ezra Pound, 1924
‘[I]t was towards the end of my school days or in my first year or two at Harvard University [that] I was reading the poets of the ‘nineties, who were the only poets […] who at that period of history seemed to have anything to offer me as a beginner’.T.S. Eliot, Saltire Review, iv, 1957
If Ezra Pound’s clamorous injunction – ‘make it new!’ – might be considered the first commandment of modernism, then Brecht’s dictum – ‘efface the traces!’ – stands as its complementary shadow statement. As the example of Eliot begins to illustrate, the Poundian urge to transfigure ‘legitimate’ influences results in a comparable urge to efface influences considered inappropriate. However, criticism has often proved inadequately alert to the motives underlying authorial advertisement and evasion of influence, instead colluding with the artist in the construction of a suspiciously orderly canonical narrative of modernist influence. We dutifully discuss Eliot as the heir of Dante and Donne; we corroborate Woolf’s departure from Wells and Bennett; we identify the Ibsen in Exiles, and the Confucianism of the Cantos. Continue reading →
