Apocalypse and After
232 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:30 Jan 1995
ISBN:9780817307325
Apocalypse and After
Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky
By Bruce Comens
University of Alabama Press
Examines the development of Modernism into Postmodernism as it occurs in the works of three major poets
Apocalypse and After attends closely to the social and political dimensions of the development of Modernism into Postmodernism as embodied in the works of three major poets. Modernism’s struggle to develop a new global strategy was to a great extent a response to the catastrophe of World War I, while the Postmodern resort to fragmentary tactics stems from the failure of Modernist strategy both to avert World War II and to come to terms with the horror of the atomic bomb.
Apocalypse and After attends closely to the social and political dimensions of the development of Modernism into Postmodernism as embodied in the works of three major poets. Modernism’s struggle to develop a new global strategy was to a great extent a response to the catastrophe of World War I, while the Postmodern resort to fragmentary tactics stems from the failure of Modernist strategy both to avert World War II and to come to terms with the horror of the atomic bomb.
‘Comens offers the most persuasive account that I have yet seen of the movement from Modernism to Postmodernism, with Pound as an ultimately tragic example of the perils of Modernism, with Williams presented as an incipient Postmodernist, and with Zukofsky as representative of a fully developed Postmodernist.’
—Burton Hatlen, University of Maine
Bruce Comens is assistant professor of English at Temple University.
