American Modernism's Expatriate Scene

This study takes as its point of departure an essential premise: that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy which 'fatherlands' and 'mother tongues' are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and 'nativist' obsessions with the purity of the 'mother tongue.' At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation, and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond. Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of Spicer's peer, John Ashbery.Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism, and modernism.

Katz [has] a firm grasp of the current state of play in the academic study of modernism and of transatlantic cultural relations in North America. Both of these are currently expanding sub-fields where adventurous new work is being done, and where familiar curricula and syllabi are undergoing revision. Katz's project will be right at home (to steal one of his ironic tropes) in this context. I found the material enormously impressive, and thoroughly engrossing. -- Brian McHale, Humanities Distinguished Professor in English, Ohio State University Daniel Katz's American Modernism's Expatriate Scene breaks new methodological and interpretative ground in the study of American modernism. Through detailed, sophisticated readings of key writers such as Henry James, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and James Schulyer, Katz reconceives American modernism as a tense, productive result of the many-sided 'interference' of languages and cultures in an international space. His book makes an important contribution to the study of American modernism and to recent modernist studies more generally. -- Tyrus Miller, Professor of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz Katz [has] a firm grasp of the current state of play in the academic study of modernism and of transatlantic cultural relations in North America. Both of these are currently expanding sub-fields where adventurous new work is being done, and where familiar curricula and syllabi are undergoing revision. Katz's project will be right at home (to steal one of his ironic tropes) in this context. I found the material enormously impressive, and thoroughly engrossing. Daniel Katz's American Modernism's Expatriate Scene breaks new methodological and interpretative ground in the study of American modernism. Through detailed, sophisticated readings of key writers such as Henry James, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and James Schulyer, Katz reconceives American modernism as a tense, productive result of the many-sided 'interference' of languages and cultures in an international space. His book makes an important contribution to the study of American modernism and to recent modernist studies more generally.

Daniel Katz is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is author of Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Northwestern University Press, 1999).