Transpacific Displacement
Chapter One
The Intertextual Travel
of Amy Lowell
One "reads" a landscape the way one reads a text.
Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life
What follows is not a coda or supplement to Imagism, although Amy
Lowell's work is often denigrated as such-"Amygism" is the usual epithet
used to parody the poetry activities that went on after Lowell took over
from Pound the leadership in promoting Imagism. My focus is on a new
mode of conceptualizing Asia as manifested in Lowell's work. In the preceding
chapter, I described the ways in which Pound founded his pancultural
program on intertextual ground; in this one, I explore a unique feature
of Lowell's ethnographic writing: her intertextual travel. As a traveler
in the world of texts, the Imagist poet Lowell projected the image of the
Far East in a manner characteristic of a tourist's fascination with a locale
rather than an old-time ethnographer's devotion to a particular geographical
area. However, Lowell's seemingly sup ... read full excerpt from Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature ebook
