Traces the controversial poet’s thinking about teaching and learning throughout his career.
Once described by T. S. Eliot as ‚first and foremost, a teacher and campaigner, ‚ Ezra Pound has received no shortage of critical attention. Super Schoolmaster suggests that Pound still has quite a bit to teach readers in the twenty-first century, particularly amid increasing threats to the humanities and higher education. Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre illuminate Pound’s contradictory career of innovative poetics and reactionary politics by following his extensive thinking about teaching and learning within and beyond the academy. Given how scornful Pound could be of institutionalized schooling, the book’s title may feel like a misnomer; however, Super Schoolmaster makes clear how wholeheartedly this modernist icon believed in the importance and vitality of learning. Pound’s brief flirtation with becoming a professional academic ended early on, but his entire life’s work can be seen as an immense pedagogical lesson, promoting a living, breathing culture tied to the very fabric of contemporary life. Not to ignore his critics, who have taught the necessity of reading against Pound, Scholes and Ben-Merre propose that to reread Pound now is to celebrate the joy of learning while always remaining mindful of the ultimate perils of his example.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgments
Preface: Back to Basics
Robert Scholes
Preface: In a Station
David Ben-Merre
Introduction
1. Pounding the Academy: The Poet as Student and Teacher
2. The Critic as Teacher: Pound’s ‚New Method‘ in Scholarship
3. How to Read Comparatively
4. Periodical Studies
5. The Instructor as Propagandist
Afterword: Schools of Fish
David Ben-Merre
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Über den Autor
David Ben-Merre is Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State College, State University of New York.