Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Native Well Being: Henry James and the “Cosmopolite”
- 2 The Mother's Tongue: Seduction, Authenticity, and Interference in The Ambassadors
- 3 Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation
- 4 Pound and Translation: Ideogram and the Vulgar Tongue
- 5 Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and the American Language
- 6 Jack Spicer's After Lorca: Translation as Delocalization
- 7 Homecomings: The Poet's Prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Native Well Being: Henry James and the “Cosmopolite”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 Native Well Being: Henry James and the “Cosmopolite”
- 2 The Mother's Tongue: Seduction, Authenticity, and Interference in The Ambassadors
- 3 Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation
- 4 Pound and Translation: Ideogram and the Vulgar Tongue
- 5 Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and the American Language
- 6 Jack Spicer's After Lorca: Translation as Delocalization
- 7 Homecomings: The Poet's Prose of Ashbery, Schuyler and Spicer
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Linguistic Position and Expatriation
Let us begin near the end of “modernism,” rather than at its beginnings; let us begin forcibly thrust into America, rather than willfully absented from it. In 1944, from the misery of political exile in America, Theodor Adorno extrapolated the following concerning cultural displacement and intellectual life:
Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem. He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him, however flawless his knowledge of trade-union organizations or the automobile industry may be; he is always astray. Between the reproduction of his own existence under the monopoly of mass culture, and impartial, responsible work, yawns an irreconcilable breach. His language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge, sapped. (Minima Moralia, 33)
Here, under the shadow of the catastrophe of Nazism and the Second World War, Adorno figures his American exile as sheer loss. Given the biographical and historical circumstances, such an attitude is hardly surprising, but still, in its hyperbolic violence and in the context of both Adorno's own intellectual positions and those of the artists and intellectuals who interested him, this statement should give pause. After all, Adorno applies his case to a general condition which he defines not as “forced exile” but simply “emigration,” and moreover, resoundingly rejects universalist and cosmopolitan positions which one might imagine quite congenial to him.
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- Information
- American Modernism's Expatriate SceneThe Labour of Translation, pp. 10 - 33Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007