The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky - Softcover

Perelman, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520087550 ISBN 13: 9780520087552

Publisher: University of California Press, 1994

Synopsis

A paradox: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky all wrote their central works to be "masterpieces," synoptic views of the world that would change the very consciousness of the public. And yet these writings are so hard to read that instead of producing social change, they have produced critical industries dedicated to decoding them.

In new, provocative readings of these demanding authors, Bob Perelman shows how the inaccessibility of their writing reveals the conflict between the goals of social relevance and literary innovation. As self-proclaimed geniuses, they used language in new ways that were inevitably incomprehensible to the large audiences that they sought to instruct, change, or simply dazzle. By seeing genius as a role that is simultaneously social and poetic, Perelman reads the difficulty of their works as rooted in the cultural relationship between authors and their readers.

Perelman's brilliant analysis offers scholars new insight and opens these works to readers who have been frustrated by their difficulty. The Trouble with Genius is one poet's passionate attempt to make sense of the stylistic and political challenge of these modernists and to find, although not uncritically, the value of their work for readers and writers today.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Most poets define poetry by creating it. Bob Perelman creates it by defining it, and is thus one step ahead of all the other poets under the sun, one step closer to colliding with Zeno's vanishing point, to merging coyote with road runner, to winning the hand."--John Ashbery

"Profound, subtle, and wonderfully written--this is a book from which anyone interested in the twentieth century can learn."--Marjorie Perloff

About the Author

Bob Perelman is a well-known poet and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0520087550
• ISBN 13: 9780520087552
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276