Ezra Pound and 20th-Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word by James Dowthwaite (review)

Abstract

219 Making of Americans is rooted in the morphological studies of brain tissue she conducted as a medical student at Johns Hopkins University. A brain is dissected into two-dimensional slices, from which the anatomist must then project its three-dimensional structures; similarly, “Stein’s descriptive method in The Making of Americans is almost sculptural, evoking a spatial quality similar to the sense of volume present in her descriptions of the morphology of neuronal tissues” (215). Finally, in “Clouds” we return to Robertson and her claim that “description is the imagination of matter,” a Lucretian idea by which “description does not operate representationally, as a transparent layer through which phenomena are observed; rather, it operates additively, as a mode of decoration, which elaborates the surfaces of entities” (266–67). A poetics of liveliness adds to or amplifies the phenomena it describes, communicating the activity of materiality to the reader; to return to Elizabeth Grosz’s idea about “the subsistence of the ideal in the material”: “Such a position suggests that ideality is immanent in materiality so as to provide the framing conditions for a nonreductive materialism. In other words, it seeks to ‘frame, orient, and direct material things and processes,’ allowing matter to become other than what it is in the present and to assume meaning” (274). Smailbegović’s gamble follows that of Jane Bennett, who argues that “a touch of anthropomorphism . . . can catalyze a sensibility” that reveals “‘isomorphisms’ across what had previously seemed to be ‘categorical divides’” (164). In other words, her project is to break down reified discourses of materiality by means of a poetics as lively as the nonhuman things it describes, or decorates. It is a significant, serious, yet playful account of how, in the hands of these poetnaturalists, metaphor can be used strategically to liberate readers and their reading matter alike.