Faculty Introduction for “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China”

I congratulate Bai Xiao on the inclusion of her essay “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China” for publication in our writing journal. She wrote this essay for the Perspectives on the Humanities course titled “Sino-Western Literary Exchanges” that I taught in the Fall of 2016. It is an extremely ambitious project, stretching over Pound’s entire career as a poet-translator, from his initial encounter with the Fenollosa manuscripts to his tragic years after World War II, and covering a stunning array of texts and ideas, from Cathay through the Da xue or, as Pound rendered it, The Great Digest to the Cantos, from the nature of the Chinese language through the social and economic problems in the interwar period to the moral and political teachings of Confucius. In ranging back and forth among this plethora of materials, the essay deserves credit for not losing sight of its argument: namely, Pound’s China is an imaginary construct invented as a cure for the crises facing the Western world in his day. I recommend the essay for its many insights, its exuberant ambition, and its value as a case study of cultural exchange.

Read “Making It New: Ezra Pound’s ‘Luminous’ Mythmaking of China” here.

Lin Chen, Lecturer in the Writing Program