Pound & Popularizing Primers

BOOK REVIEWS of the map thus belie its form; it is, finally, this implied caution against the tendency to seek comfortable directives that preclude the unpredictable "plurabilities" in life that Joyce wishes us to read. Mary Lowe-Evans ------------------ University of West Florida Pound & Popularizing Primers Michael Coyle. Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995. χ + 256 pp. $37.50 READERS WHO TURN to this book expecting to find Pound refashioned in order to anticipate present-day forms of popular genres may be surprised to find that by "popular" Coyle refers to the "popularizing primers" Pound wrote to spread his ideas on economics and society. Few surprises are to be found in the claim that "culture" serves in place of "ideology" for the ordering of society and history. Whereas "ideology," Coyle argues, constitutes a totalizing vision exterior to what it would underlie, "culture" designates the material histories that cannot be separated from a discursive praxis. The title may raise expectations contrary to what the book is about, but readers will find much to admire in this work, particularly in its exposition of Pound's debt to Victorian concepts of epic and cultural totality and that era's faith in the efficacy of popularizing primers. He traces the genealogy of such polemical works as the ABC of Economics and Guide to Kulchur back to Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, as well as less familiar pedagogical texts, and situates Pound's Cantos within and against the late Victorian notion of Homeric epic as primarily a narrative poem. Although his discussion of the generic features of the Cantos deserves the notice of the poem's readers, his argument about genre theory itself is seriously flawed. Coyle frequently speaks of "genre" as if it required no definition: it simply means "types." In his introduction, he briefly sets out his thesis that genre study is not "about classification" but is to be understood "dynamically, without reference to a prior model of a static, essentialized and closed system" (3). He quotes Ralph Cohen: "'Each member alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or changing constituents, especially those of members most closely related to it'" (4). Like Cohen, Coyle has a structuralist concept of genre: it possesses both a synchronic dimension with a hierarchical arrangement and a diachronic force that undoes strict categorization. My objection to this is not unlike my objection to his use of the word "culture" to mean practically all human experience, a looseness of terminology that he shares with many proponents of 393 ELT 39:3 1996 cultural studies: genre is any form of expression, and all genres are mixed. Thus, he can assert "genre-based history asks how fascism enters the discursive mixtures of Pound's writings," as if fascism is itself a discourse on the same order as the epic or novel. My skepticism about such claims becomes even greater when Coyle refers to musical notation as a genre in his reading of Canto 75.1 ask, does music itself constitute a genre? A genre of what? Literature? Culture? Discourse? If such is the case, then to speak of genre is redundant because genre is just another name for discursive systems. Coyle is on surer grounds when he sticks to his argument that Pound sought an inclusiveness that allowed him to incorporate various—what shall we call them? topics? discourses?— subjects in his long poem, and this totalizing aim reflected not only a bias against what is conventionally thought of as "literature" but also a populist impulse to reconstitute the divisions of experience into a "lived totality" (117). I dwell on Coyle's imprecise use of terms and his excessive claims for the comprehensiveness of what he calls "generic analysis" largely because I find his errors symptomatic of much present-day criticism. When he closes his book with the assertion that he has "sought to establish 'culture' as a discourse, a syntax for the ordering history and society," I am forced to conclude that he has merely inflated "culture" to mean absolutely any product of human action; the "discourse of culture" is "ideology" writ large. When he speaks of discourse being inseparable from what it is...