Ezra Pound

This paper will outline the key elements of an ongoing research project, whose main focus is to explore the application of new technology to the study of key works of modernism, whilst simultaneously arguing that modernism can itself offer fresh perspectives on contemporary digital art. I am interested in the way modernism presents the artwork as both an object to be experienced and as a structured theory of knowledge. This tension can be seen most obviously in such canonical works as Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1917-1969) where his aesthetic of the ‘luminous fragment’ is set against the poem’s larger, Dantescan, vision of history. Concomitantly, I wish to argue that the resources of digital technology offer a significant new set of tools for approaching modernism itself, allowing us to explore the boundary between the work of scholarship and work of art.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

from Project MUSE: A prominent strategy in some of the most innovative electronic literature online is the appropriation and adaptation of literary modernism, what I call “digital modernism.” This essay introduces digital modernism by examining a work that exemplifies it: Dakota by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries. I read this Flash-based work in relation to its literary inspiration: the authors claim that Dakota is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos part I and part II.” The authorial framework claims modernism’s cultural capital for electronic literature and encourages close reading of its text, but the work’s formal presentation of speeding, flashing text challenges such efforts. Reading Dakota as it reads Pound’s first two cantos exposes how modernism serves contemporary, digital literature by providing a model of how to “MAKE IT NEW” by renovating a literary past.