Sean Golden has recently published “Liu Xie ‘s Wenxin diaolong,
Ernest Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character and the 20th century avant garde”,
in Chen Yuehong, Tiziana Lippielo & Maddalena Barenghi (eds.), LinkingAncient and Contemporary: Continuities and Discontinuities in ChineseLiterature, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari Digital Publishing, 265-282.
Abstract
Ezra Pound’s edition of Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts
for The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry was a landmark in
modernist European poetry and the imagist movement at the beginning of the 20th
century. Pound’s work has stood for Fenollosa’s vision since then and has been
the subject of controversy among Sinologists for its emphasis on the graphic
elements of Chinese written characters. A recent edition of the complete
Fenollosa manuscripts by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein has
made it possible to see the differences between Fenollosa’s interests and Pound’s
interpretations and to restore Fenollosa’s original intentions. Even though
Sinologists have questioned the Fenollosa-Pound emphasis on the graphic
elements of Chinese writing as a component part of Chinese poetry, Ch. 39 of
the classical Chinese text 文心雕龍 Wenxin diaolong by 劉勰 Liu Xie (ca. 466-520) refers
specifically to this phenomenon as a mode in the composition of Chinese poetry.
Case studies of work by John Cage and Jackson Mac Low show that Fenollosa’s
impact on 20th century avant garde literature went far beyond the works of Ezra
Pound.