Super Schoolmaster by Robert Scholes;David Ben-Merre;

Author:Robert Scholes;David Ben-Merre;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pound’s practical experience with these journals and his many attempts to penetrate the world of the large-circulation magazines left him with strong feelings about the role of periodicals in the modern world. And, with the practical college courses for which he advocated in mind, he needed to teach people about these real-world contexts. He found direct expression on four occasions: his “Studies in Contemporary Mentality” in The New Age in 1917–18; an article called “Data” in his magazine The Exile, No. 4 (Autumn 1928); a fuller treatment of what he had written in “Data” in a new article, “Small Magazines,” published in the American academic periodical The English Journal (College Edition) in 1930; and an article he wrote for Orage’s New English Weekly in 1934 called “Murkn Magzeens” (“Murkn” means both “American” and “murky” or obscuring realities in Pound’s idiom). These articles tend to fall into one of two patterns: either measured praise of the noncommercial journals or sharp criticism of popular magazines. (He also muttered about popular magazines occasionally in his radio broadcasts.) It is clear that he saw his “Studies in Contemporary Mentality” as a sottisier, or collection of stupidities, which he enjoyed presenting to the readership of The New Age. His motivation for writing about the small magazines in an American academic publication a dozen years after “Studies in Contemporary Mentality” is clarified by a remark he made in The Exile, introducing his annotated list of small magazines and presses:

… as institutions which would never have fed any of the men who did the work are now ready to feed almost anyone who will write anodyne monographs about the matter, one may as well set down a few dates, and give a list of the periodicals where the struggle took place. (The Exile 4:104)

Those “institutions” that would not support artists but will now support those who comment on their work must be the colleges and universities of the United States, which Pound would address directly in his 1930 article on “Small Magazines” for the College Edition of The English Journal. Back in 1917, however, he had turned his attention directly to the popular magazines of Britain in his twenty articles on Contemporary Mentality.

Table 4.3 gives a fair idea of the range Pound covered in this series of articles, but it doesn’t convey the pedagogical attitude and tone that he takes in them. Wyndham Lewis, writing Pound about these articles from France, told him, “They are certainly the best things the New Age has contained for many a day” (Pound/Lewis, 114), and Pound replied that “Orage hopes to get the Contemporary Mentality published as a book” (115). Although that did not happen, the articles still serve as an excellent example of the “Super Schoolmaster” at work. (The numbering of the series went wrong, with two articles numbered “XI.” In referring to articles after the first of these number elevens, we use the corrected numbers provided in parentheses in the table.)

Table 4.3. “Studies in Contemporary Mentality” as it appeared

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.