The thesis is devoted to the analysis of innovative and experimental artistic practices employed by one of the founders of modernism against the background of the poetics of the traditional epic. The author represents the modernist epic as a creative recreation of the divine, transcendent coherence of the universe in the form of history which is ordered by an singular and esemplastic, evocative and alusive, self-conscious poet's vision.
This study is characteristically textocentric. Despite the interdisciplinary aparatus which intrinsically corresponds to the poetics of Cantos, the privileged analytical and interpretational strategy in this literary study is close reading, an attempt to comprehensively examine signification components of a poetic work in its autotelic, palpable and empirical fabric. A paramount artistic vehicle to (re)structure the modern epic has been taken verbatim from the Ur-Cantos: «the truth [i]s inside this discourse». The conceptual modus operandi of the research employs such critical methods as historical, cultural, and biographical approaches, genre study, hermeneutics, intertextuality as well as interpretive programs developed in the framework of structuralist (R. Jakobson) and post-structuralist literary studies including receptive aesthetics (W. Iser), myth criticism (N. Frye), narratology R. Barthes), comparative literature (V. Zhirmunsky, D. Nalyvayko), and semiotics (U. Eco).
The concepts of the Russian formalism have proven to be profoundly relevant for the study of Pound’s artistic modes of representation and account for the uncharted venue in exploring the Cantos. In particular, it concerns the amoebaean composition of poetic language defined by A. Veselovsky and V. Zhirmunsky. Pound’s The Spirit of Romance also envokes comparisons with Russian formalism. His dictum «all ages are contemporaneous» is echoed by V. Shklovsky and has been compared in the research with Lesya Ukrayinka’s poetry. The author treats Tynyanov’s theory of «literary minutiae» as a telling and revealing analogue of Pound’s «luminous detail». One of the aspects of the Cantos as an epic poem in its logic of fiction can be described by Tynyanov’s definition of the «epic with system shift». It is characterized by the disrupted chronological organization of the narrative which is replaced by literary and historical fragments, white spots in official history that are combined by poetic imagination and restored into their entirety. The thesis seeks to prove that Pound transformed and enriched a traditional epic – pre-reflexive and logocentric – view of the world into the form of a subjective, fragmentary construction marking the Weltanschauung of the personae in search of the epic as the unity of human being and history, individual and society in the post-epic, modern era. The lyrical self of the Cantos expresses the inner world of an alienated personality in an atomized bourgeois society.
The study introduces the concept of the «versified history». Its constitutive elements include such inherent features of the ancient epic as duplication of episodes, in medias res and the topos of nostos, as well as refrain-based forms and amoebean poetic constructions, the dissolution of the lyric character in historical personae, the textualization of the cyclical movement of time. The cornerstone of the Cantos as a transformed modern epic is the multifarious dynamic relationship between the epic and lyric assumptions that generates a new syncretic form of artistic consciousness.
One of the major theoretical postulates in the research comes down to the explication of «it» in the shortest modernist manifesto «Make it new» as a call to transform and modernize narrative codes and conventions of the ancient epic. In terms of genres, Pound’s cultural history is codified in the form of the roundel, a favorite structure of later Swinburne whose innovative genre is represented in the poetry of Maksym Rylsky. As its versification makeup suggests, the roundel resembles the Poundian «repeats in history» in miniature. The epic-as-roundel functions through the condensation of semantic energy foregrounded in the refrains, and is exemplified by the imagist juxtaposition of intertextual elements. This ouroboros-like approach has been contextualized in a wider context of historic discourses in poetry by Eliot, Pound, and Yeats. A new facet of the epic introduced by Pound into the artistic representation of reality in modernism is, in particular, in the fact that in his poetic universe there is no «modern time» in the Hegelian sense, nor Bakhtinian «epic absolute past» associated with it and construed in the axiological aspect. To analyze the Cantos, this study also applies reading of the modern epic as tertium quid between traditionalism that has yet to come to terms with reflection and the reflection that had already broken with traditionalism. Reflective traditionalism built on the basis of amoebaean poetic structures provides a pro
