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The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 216 pp., cloth, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-2868-3)
THIS VOLUME includes an original essay on the relevance of Chinese writing to modern poetry by Ernest Fenollosa, along with the well-known version edited by Ezra Pound and a critical essay by Haun Saussy. The volume also contains additional pieces by Fenollosa. The piece that is central to the volume, Pound's edited version of Fenollosa's original essay, is generally considered an important source document for imagism, a central force in the development of modernist poetry early in the twentieth century. The essay has been roundly criticized by scholars of the Chinese language for naively representing the Chinese writing system as "ideographic" or pictorial. Saussy argues that it is better understood not as a serious analysis of the system of Chinese characters (although Pound's alterations may make it seem less serious in this regard than it really is) but as a philosophical manifesto on the nature of human language in general and poetry in particular. Of special interest here is its exposition of the nature of the visual perception of reality that inevitably underlies language of all kinds, whether it is ultimately expressed audibly or visually. In this regard, Fenollosa and Pound take up many of the concepts that later become important in the cognitive movement in...