An intention to say something: Chinese written characters and the visual in Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' and critics

This dissertation first examines the ways in which the critical discourse about Ezra Pound's Cantos reflects cultural and linguistic biases about the nature of sensory perception and, in turn, informs what is visual and what textual in the poem; next it constructs a vocabulary for overcoming those biases, showing one way to see and read the poem anew. Chapter One deconstructs critical thinking on visuality in the English and Chinese languages and in The Cantos. Chapters Two and Three reconstruct for The Cantos matrices of visual significance Pound criticism has hidden; Chapter Two examines non-Chinese visual marks in the poem, and Chapter Three examines Chinese. Chapter Four explores the fit of these matrices to the most widely accepted ways of viewing the poem, collage and montage, and shows the shortcomings of the two as systems for accounting for what happens in The Cantos.;In practice, critics of The Cantos have lost sight of the poem, which plays on and with the traditional distinctions associated with the visual and the verbal. Largely because "the ideogram" and "the ideogrammic method" have become umbrella terms for diverse signs and referential operations, this dissertation eschews their use, recuperating from them the uses of Chinese written characters they normally contain and fitting important distinctions to eight "articulations" (i.e. matrices of referential operation). The articulations register both Pound's semiotic practices and the presences they indicate within the text--scribal, editorial, poetic, and others. The articulations offer an interpretive model which allows a sign to operate in several referential systems at once and serve rather as means to show one such adaptive system than as exegetical ends in themselves. This study, rather than offering a new reading of the poem, offers a new way to read it.