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Modern Philology
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BOOK REVIEW
E216
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Book Review
E217
signal importance to Jewish poets from Louis Zukofsky through Allen Ginsberg to Charles Bernstein (46).
The first chapter, Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization, juxtaposes
the Scottish Hugh MacDiarmid and the Ugandan Okot pBitek, revealing
the mutual imbrication of the global and the local in the work of the two
poets. Complicating received notions of orientalism, Ramazani shows that
the traffic between modernism and empire goes both ways. In A Transnational Poetics, which follows, Ramazani contests the academic literary
nationalism that is a particular issue in the study of poetry and offers instead
his own paradigm, adapted from James Clifford (Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1997]), of what the third chapter of A Transnational Poetics terms Traveling
Poetry. In a dazzling display of the kind of contextual close reading that he
advocates, Ramazani shows that the sonic qualities of poetry in themselves
constitute a form of travel: In poetry, travelnot merely the plot-driven
excursus into a foreign landmay occur at the level of a substituted letter,
a varied rhythm, a pivoting line (59). Poetrys place-leaping lineation,
cross-cultural symbols, and aesthetic hybridization . . . affords a remarkable
freedom of movement and affiliative connection (6263). Traveling genres
are the focus of the fourth chapter, Nationalism, Transnationalism, and
the Poetry of Mourning. The sonnet and the elegy are prime examples of
genre operating as a transhistorical and transcultural template for literary
analysis (71). Ramazani, a leading scholar of the elegy, develops here what
he calls a taxonomy for elegiac Transnationalism (72) using W. B. Yeats as
his exemplar and drawing on his own fine studies of Yeats and of elegy, Yeats
and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy and the Sublime (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1990), and Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to
Heaney (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Arguing that the poetry of
mourning can be made to serve both nation-specific and cosmopolitan
ends (72), Ramazani suggests that it is elegys intertextuality that, despite
its frequent investment in the discourse of nationalism, renders it an intrinsically transnational modeintertextuality is always and inherently transnational, and so poetrys cross-national molecular structure betrays the
national imaginary on behalf of which it is sometimes made to speak (13).
The intertextual properties of elegy, however, make it what Ramazani, ventriloquizing Harold Bloom, terms weak transnationalism, in contradistinction to more aggressive varieties of transnational poetics, which flaunt
their discrepant cultural materials (81).
The chapter that follows, Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity,
both extends the chronological frame of modernism and complicates postcolonial rubrics that excoriate modernist writers for their complicity with
the processes of empire. Ramazani argues instead that Western modernism
enabled a range of non-Western poets after World War II to explore their
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E218
MODERN PHILOLOGY
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Book Review
E219
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