Books by Sean Mark
Transatlantica: revue d'études américaines • American studies journal
In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on... more In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them-in particular, on Pound's Italian years and Pasolini's use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.
Articles and Chapters by Sean Mark
Textual Practice, 2025
Written on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, this essay reappraises Hugh
Kenner’s The Pound E... more Written on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, this essay reappraises Hugh
Kenner’s The Pound Era in light of the politics of the work, its subject and its
author. It has been suggested that the ‘forgetting’ that has marked Kenner’s
legacy, in the 20 years since his death, owes much to the fact that he did not
represent a particular critical mode or leave behind a replicable model, but
this essay probes this ‘forgetting’ on political grounds. Analysing the book’s
omissions and minimisations, and challenging some of its claims and
strategies, the essay argues that, without ever denying Pound’s fascism and
anti-Semitism outright, Kenner played a fundamental and underexamined
role in compiling a toolbox of Poundian apologetics. Tracing the implications
and tenacity of these positions, the essay considers how the connection with
Pound, within the broader context of Kenner’s own politics, has affected his
reception. Dwelling on scholarly obituaries and homages written at Kenner’s
death in 2003, the essay concludes, moving beyond The Pound Era, by
interrogating the ideas of elegy and finitude, the mourning of the so-called
‘gentleman scholar’, that unite many of these short texts, reflecting on
Kenner’s significance to literary criticism and literary studies today.
Transatlantica, 2023
Over four days, the conference gathered scholars from around the world, working on contemporary N... more Over four days, the conference gathered scholars from around the world, working on contemporary North American fiction and poetry, with a variety of theoretical frameworks and approaches-from critical and literary theory, narratology, and autofiction, to metamodernism, (post-)postmodernism, and the postsecular-and a focus on media and intermediality (literature and photography, musicology, and art).
Modernism/modernity, 2022
Sillages Critiques, 2022
Content Provider, comedian Stewart Lee's live show first previewed in late 2016, begins with a qu... more Content Provider, comedian Stewart Lee's live show first previewed in late 2016, begins with a quandary. After a month's work on the show, conceived as "two hours on the notion of the individual in a digitised free-market economy", the Brexit referendum happened, "and there seemed to be an assumption everywhere that I should've written some jokes about Brexit". Lee continues: Now I haven't written any jokes about Brexit, 'cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for eighteen months, and as I didn't know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn't write any jokes about it in case I couldn't use them in the show and monetise the work I've done. Right. So I haven't written any jokes about Brexit, 'cos I didn't see the point of committing to a course of action for which there's no logical or financial justification. (Lee 2019, 296) Content Provider ironises on the commercial viability of writing topical material at a time of political upheaval; and it is certainly arguable that the three-year machinations following the Brexit vote-the theatrics of its negotiations and brinkmanship, with its shifting ascendancies and allegiances-constituted something novel in the panorama of British politics, culminating in the murder of an MP, the prorogation of parliament and the 2019 general election. "How did the British become so excitable?", asked Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal, remarking "how untethered from its age-old traits of stability, continuity and moderation the country has come to be". 1 And yet how distant does this national melodrama now appear? It is perhaps not only the relentlessness of the news cycle that has shifted perspectives on Brexit and the ways in which its stalling absorbed and further polarised the country. The Covid-19 pandemic, which began its sweep across the globe days after Brexit became a legal reality, inherited its mantle of political instability and threw into even sharper relief its more
The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, 2019
Papers of the British School at Rome, 2020
Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde, 2019
Ezra Pound's Green World Nature, Landscape and Language, 2018
Editions and Translations by Sean Mark
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Books by Sean Mark
Articles and Chapters by Sean Mark
Kenner’s The Pound Era in light of the politics of the work, its subject and its
author. It has been suggested that the ‘forgetting’ that has marked Kenner’s
legacy, in the 20 years since his death, owes much to the fact that he did not
represent a particular critical mode or leave behind a replicable model, but
this essay probes this ‘forgetting’ on political grounds. Analysing the book’s
omissions and minimisations, and challenging some of its claims and
strategies, the essay argues that, without ever denying Pound’s fascism and
anti-Semitism outright, Kenner played a fundamental and underexamined
role in compiling a toolbox of Poundian apologetics. Tracing the implications
and tenacity of these positions, the essay considers how the connection with
Pound, within the broader context of Kenner’s own politics, has affected his
reception. Dwelling on scholarly obituaries and homages written at Kenner’s
death in 2003, the essay concludes, moving beyond The Pound Era, by
interrogating the ideas of elegy and finitude, the mourning of the so-called
‘gentleman scholar’, that unite many of these short texts, reflecting on
Kenner’s significance to literary criticism and literary studies today.
Editions and Translations by Sean Mark
Kenner’s The Pound Era in light of the politics of the work, its subject and its
author. It has been suggested that the ‘forgetting’ that has marked Kenner’s
legacy, in the 20 years since his death, owes much to the fact that he did not
represent a particular critical mode or leave behind a replicable model, but
this essay probes this ‘forgetting’ on political grounds. Analysing the book’s
omissions and minimisations, and challenging some of its claims and
strategies, the essay argues that, without ever denying Pound’s fascism and
anti-Semitism outright, Kenner played a fundamental and underexamined
role in compiling a toolbox of Poundian apologetics. Tracing the implications
and tenacity of these positions, the essay considers how the connection with
Pound, within the broader context of Kenner’s own politics, has affected his
reception. Dwelling on scholarly obituaries and homages written at Kenner’s
death in 2003, the essay concludes, moving beyond The Pound Era, by
interrogating the ideas of elegy and finitude, the mourning of the so-called
‘gentleman scholar’, that unite many of these short texts, reflecting on
Kenner’s significance to literary criticism and literary studies today.