The Poetics of Fascism Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man [Hardcover]

Morrison examines the legacy of the modernist poetics of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, as it relates to current theoretical orthodoxies, and traces its influence on the current crisis in post-structural literary theory. Morrison reads the politics of post-structural theory in relation to the socio-cultural arguments espoused in the poetry and prose by Pound and Eliot, and reveals a continuity between that theory and high modernism's tendency towards fascism. Without reducing the political implications of poetry to mere caricature and without slighting the force and fact of literary mediation, Morrison has produced a book that will reshape the discussion of the social dimension of modernism. He concludes with a provocative analysis of deconstruction and the work of Paul de Man, and makes a case for a new post-structural theory that can accommodate history.

The Poetics of Fascismis a remarkable achievement and its serious, important, and fervent argument deserves to attract a wide readership. Its scholarly, but always accessible, reframings of the relations among modernism, marxist thought, and poststructural criticism are certain to engage all who are interested in the politics of contemporary culture. With any luck this book will make it impossible to teach 'modernism as usual' ever again: impossible, that is, to celebrate a modernism whose ideology we ostentatiously fail, or pointedly refuse, to address. --Lee Edelman,Tufts University

[Morrison] knows his business, is learned on fascism, is thoroughly conversant whith the records of Pound and Eliot, and argues plausibly for their influence on the welter of notions associated with postmodernism. --The Sewannee Review