Poetry and Poetics of the Modernist Everyday in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound

Christine Froula, Northwestern University - invited by the CERCC research center

Building on my recent and forthcoming work on these authors, this presentation explores the interplay of inherited literary forms and conventions, contingent features of modernity, and aesthetic imagination in the forging of the formally innovative modernist poetics of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), and Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948). Drawing on some draft passages, we’ll foreground the impact of modern technologies (power station, train, atomic bomb, astronomical detection of the galaxies of galaxies beyond the Milky Way) on these works’ landscapes, cityscapes, and representations of the cosmos, both in relation to aspects of their formal poetics and as figured in their narrators’, characters’, and speakers’ lyric voices.