Stability and Greed: The Aesthetics of Gold in the Modernist Discourses of Ezra Pound and John Maynard Keynes
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemAutor
Peeters, Claire MarieDirector
Pérez Fernández, José MaríaDepartamento
Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y AlemanaMateria
Modernism Ezra Pound Poetics John Maynard Keynes Economic Theory Gold Standard
Fecha
2018-01-31Fecha lectura
2018-01-31Patrocinador
Universidad de Granada. Máster en Literatura y Lingüística InglesasResumen
Ezra Pound’s poetry is infused with references to economic themes and ideas. One example is
Canto XLV, “With Usura” (1936), which is underpinned by economic ideas. The discussion of
Ezra Pound’s poetics in this work, especially viewed against his economics, takes as its starting
point discourses around gold and the gold standard. The gold standard was a widely contested
policy issue in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this debate, we see the intersection of
recurring themes that are evident in works of both poetics and economics, such as the importance
of nature versus artificiality, the issue and problem of representation, and the pursuit of the “just”
or the good. In this work, I apply a historically-informed close reading of Canto XLV,
developing the aforementioned themes and contextualizing the poem using a textual comparative
application of two modernist texts on economics. This work references as a comparative point of
contrast the writings of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), a giant in twentiethcentury
intellectual and economic thought, who is seldom referenced in literary studies, but who
was seen by Ezra Pound as the principal proponent, and in many ways the embodiment, of the
capitalist society he so despised.