Hugh Kenner

"Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era could as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes...."The Pound Era presents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."—The New York Times

The Pound Era

The Stoic Comedians (Lannan Selection)

Flaubert, Joyce And Beckett

 T.S.Eliot

Invisible Poet

A Critical Guidebook

Wyndham Lewis

Kenner applies his extraordinarily nimble mind and unrivaled style to the alchemy of speech turning into language, language becoming art, and art finally settling down as culture. A variety of literary topics are addressed in forty-three lively, often humorous, and wonderfully informative essays.

Essays

Historical Fictions

The Art of Poetry

One of America's most celebrated critics here brings his customary wit and erudition to bear on a particularly provocative theme: the response of literary Modernism to a changing environment wrought by technology. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Hugh Kenner, observes, technology tended to engulf people gradually, coercing behavior they were not aware of. The Modernist writers were sensitive to technological change, however, and throughout their works are reflections of this fact. Kenner shows, for example, how Eliot's lines One thinks of all the hands/That are raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms suggest the advent of the alarm clock and, beyond that, what the clocks enabled: the new world of the commuter, in which a principal event was waking up in the morning under the obligation to get yourself somewhere else, and arrive there on time. In fascinating examinations of Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, in addition to Eliot, Kenner looks at how inventions as various as the linotype, the typewriter, the subway, and the computer altered the way the world was viewed and depicted. Whether discussing Joyce's acute awareness of the nuances of typesetting or Beckett's experiments with a proto-computer-language, Kenner consistently illuminates in fresh new ways the works of these authors and offers, almost incidentally, a wealth of anecdotes and asides that will delight the general reader and the literary specialist alike

The Mechanic Muse

The Art of Poetry. [Edited By] H. Kenner

Joyce's Voices

One of the most important books ever written on Uylsses, Dublin's Joyce established Hugh Kenner as a significant modernist critic. This pathbreaking analysis presents Uylsses as a "bit of anti-matter that Joyce sent out to eat the world." The author assumes that Joyce wasn't a man with a box of mysteries, but a writer with a subject : his native European metropolis of Dublin. Dublin's Joyce provides the reader with a perspective of Joyce as a superemely important literary figure without considering him to be the revealer of a secret doctrine.

Dublin's Joyce

Chuck Jones

Describes the works of a director of Warner Brothers animated cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s, and explains how his sense of humor shaped the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and other familiar characters

A Flurry of Drawings

Guy Davenport

"Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) and Guy Davenport (1927-2005) first met in September 1953 when each gave a paper on Ezra Pound at Columbia University. They met again in the fall of 1957, and their correspondence begins with Kenner's letter of March 7, 1958. In the next forty-four years, they exchanged over one thousand letters. Their correspondence about shared enthusiasm is a quarry for those interested in unique perspectives on Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage, Jonathan Williams, and the American modernists, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Louis Zukofsky. The correspondence ends with Kenner's letter of August 9, 2002 lamenting how they had drifted apart. With his mentor, Marshall McLuhan, Kenner visited Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, in June 1948. Later he visited Pound in Venice and Rapallo. Davenport also was a visitor to St. Elizabeths, and, like Kenner, visited Pound in Italy. These letters record their fascination with Pound's intellectual journey and explore how he translated the "brutality of fact" into The Cantos. The extensive notes and cross-referencing of archival sources in Questioning Minds are a major contribution to the study of literary modernism. The letters contained within explore how new works were conceived and developed by both writers. They record faithfully, and with candor, the urgency that each brought to his intellectual and creative pursuits. Here is singular opportunity to follow the development of their unique fictions and essays" --

The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner

Questioning Minds

With characteristic flair, Kenner explores the ways James Joyce teaches us to read his novel, moving from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the strange and new, from the norms of the 19th-century novel to the open forms of modernism.

Ulysses

A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller

Bucky

Essays on Contemporary Literature

Gnomon

Professor Hugh Kenner

Geodesic Math and how to Use it

A critical discussion of Pound’s poetry and an insightful analysis of his sources.

The major sonnets, satires, epigrams, elegies, and other poetic works of Donne and Jonson are accompanied by numerous selections by such distinguished disciples as Herbert, Crashaw, Herrick, Carew, Waller, and Marvell.

Hugh Kenner

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