Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner

Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner

SOURCE: "Classroom Accuracies," in A Homemade World: The American Modernist, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975, pp. 158-93.

Kenner is the foremost American critic and chronicler of literary Modernism. He is best known for The Pound Era (1971), a massive study of the Modernist movement, and for his influential works on T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Wyndham Lewis. In the following excerpt, Kenner discusses Zukofsky in the context of the Objectivist movement, focusing on the objectivist preoccupation with language.

Like all such groups—the Imagists, for instance—the Objectivist group had fluctuating boundaries. The usual list includes, in alphabetical order, George Oppen (b. 1908; University of Oregon; sometime publisher, tool-and-die maker, cabinetmaker, mechanic); Carl Rakosi (b. 1903; attendance at four campuses, degrees in English, psychology and social work, a psychotherapist); Charles Reznikoff (b. 1894; studies at Missouri and N.Y.U.; a lawyer); and Louis Zukofsky (b. 1904; M.A. Columbia, 1924; college teacher...
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