Embodying the ideogram: Orientalism and the visual aesthetic in Modernist poetry

This dissertation argues that the innovation of visual expression in Modernist poetry was fundamentally an Orientalist discourse, one that radically diverged from all previous literary modes of fantasizing the Orient by uniquely translating the form of Chinese writing into a revolutionary art of the word. Although it is well known that Ezra Pound advocated the "ideogram" in formulating the Imagist aesthetic, this dissertation uncovers the limitations of Pound's views on the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry. I argue that his ideogrammic method was an incomplete interpretation of the potential for Chinese writing to inform Modernist innovation, for it is only through understanding the work of Pound's Latin American literary heirs, the Concretists of Brazil, that the promise of his Orientalist instigations can be seen as fulfilled. So widely marginalized for both its South American origin and its obscure reduction of verbal expression, Concretism provided the missing element that completed the sinologic agenda of the avant-garde: incorporating visual design into verbal expression via a mimesis of the form of the Chinese written character itself. Thus the aesthetic agenda of Modernist innovation was completed through a multidirectional cultural exchange---between the Far East and the West, between North and South America.