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Homewood campus

SCRC Lecture: C. D. Blanton

Thursday, November 7, 2019
4:15pm - 5:30pm
BLC Macksey Seminar Room 2043
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C. D. Blanton, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, will give a talk on Ezra Pound entitled "Without Reserve: Depreciating Pound."

Modernism and money: what’s the connection? In this talk, Professor C. D. Blanton will examine Ezra Pound’s sprawling poetic epic The Cantos in light of the poet’s evolving interest in the world of finance—an interest that grew out of the horrors of the First World War.

Fusing poetic experiment with economic doctrine, Pound sought to resist the logic of finance that had produced that war and would lead to another. But Pound’s critique, as he refined it over the course of decades, would consolidate around a fascist alternative to the raw power of the marketplace, a dangerous political fantasy that carried along with it other unsavory entanglements. In his examination of The Cantos, especially a mid-century suite called the “Rock-Drill” section, Blanton identifies—surprisingly—a pastoral foundation to Pound’s economic theories.

This event will also launch a new digital exhibition featuring materials from the Sheridan Libraries’ newly acquired Frary Collection of Ezra Pound, organized by Aaron Begg, a Denis Curatorial Fellow and doctoral candidate in English at Johns Hopkins University.

The Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), established by President Daniels and the JHU trustees, honors Dean Tabb and his commitment to promoting scholarship by encouraging original research using the Sheridan Libraries’ rare books, manuscripts, and archives. The center’s fellowships and programming create and promote contributions to the scholarly record.