Kholoud Chendoudi – Imagism and Mediterranean Poetics: A Transnational Mode of Expression
Defense Date: June 24th, 2025
Abstract:
Ezra Pound was an expatriate poet, critic and translator whose experiences abroad and contact with foreign influences altered poetic practices of the twentieth century. Through a comparative study of his imagist trinity of visuality, precision, and concision, “Imagism and Mediterranean Poetics: A Transnational Mode of Expression” investigates the contribution of the circulation of techniques and their founding theories, bound by the mobility of authors and artists, to the shaping of the transnational character of Pound’s poetry. It addresses the act of writing as a complex process through which cultural artifacts are transmitted, resisting the rigorous boundaries of native land and culture. The Cantos is approached as a celebration of the dialogic nature of literary creation that thrives upon its dialogue with other literary crafts and traditions, beyond the ambit of geography, language and time. Contesting readings of imagism as confined within the pre-war years, this dissertation aims to demonstrate that the latter is the outcome of the interaction between the national and the cosmopolitan. Therefore, it explores how it continues and contributes essentially to the transnational quality of Pound’s modern epic. It is guided by the following questions: How does Mediterranean poetry inform Pound’s imagist techniques? How do the poet’s imagist rules shape the transnational complexity of The Cantos? How can Pound’s fascist leanings be situated in relation to this poetic transnationalism? To offer a deeper insight into these intricate connections, the analyses that this dissertation delivers fall within the framework of modernism as transnational in essence, and so build on a combination of textual and historical readings to account for the allusive style of Pound and his peers.
