History and the American Language in U.S. Modernist Narratives: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway

The traditional notion of Anglo-American “high modernism” as a literary movement characterized by some writers’ attempt to free themselves from the burden of history so as to “make it new” began to be challenged in the Nineties, when several scholars identified a strong historical awareness and a widespread attention to the historiographical process as crucial elements of modernist fiction. Only a handful of scholars, however, have tackled the complex relationship between history and language on the American side of modernism. This essay focuses on the Inquest Into the State of Contemporary English Prose – a series of of six prose booklets conceived and edited by Ezra Pound between 1923 and 1924 in an attempt to analyze the state of the English language in the aftermath of the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land. The essay examines the three narratives in the series written by U.S. authors: Pound’s Indiscretions, William Carlos Williams’s The Great American Novel, and Ernest Hemingway’s in our time. Read consecutively in the context of Pound’s Inquest, these three narratives show the ways in which authors “adapt” European modernist aesthetics to a historical and vernacular dimension felt to be inherently American. In this sense, Pound’s Inquest marks the programmatic birth of an American modernist prose, in that its narratives offer a model for rethinking the boundaries of modernism by recontextualizing European “high modernism” within a framework that considers the specificity of the American experience.