This study of Ezra Pound's Cantos considers quotations in the poem which are clearly marked as such, not for their content, nor for the relationship between new and old contexts, but for the oral qualities of the quoted material, and for the rhetorical effects of the fact of quotation itself. After cataloguing the principal means by which quotation is marked, the thesis assesses the notion (most clearly formulated by Walter Benjamin) that the great power of quotation lies in its interruptive power rather than in its value as authority in argument (Chapter 3). Such interruptive power, drawing attention as it does to the multiplicity of voices available in the text, reinforces our sense of The Cantos as an oral text. This chapter and the one following — which traces the connections between The Cantos and oral traditions and traditional techniques — suggests that the neglect of the oral qualities of quotation has led critics to consider the poem as deeply and irretrievably fragmented. Situating The Cantos in relation to other oral works shows not only the ways in which Pound draws on the tension between the aural and the visual elements of the poem and of language (speech and song in contrast to the written) but also the pervasive omnipresence of the heard: the play of ear against eye is a play of melopoeia against phanopoeia, and the text of The Cantos is most fruitfully to be seen as a score for the speaking voice. Such orality enables Pound to draw directly upon the resources and techniques of the classical rhetorical tradition, thereby enabling him in quoting the words of others to lend their words the authority of his own voice. The poem thus achieves a strong sense of a multiplicity of voices and effects unified by the presence of the poet himself, without compromising Pound's conviction (shared with Yeats and Williams and others of his contemporaries) that rhetoric is utterly to be distinguished from poetry, and kept separate from it. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study concerns itself with the phenomenon of literary encyclopaedism, as especially evident in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Philippe Sollers' Paradis and Ezra Pound's Cantos. The study focuses on developing the notion of an encyclopaedic literary mode and on establishing the existence of a genre of fictional encyclopaedias. It finds an encyclopaedic mode in literature to be one comprehending and imitating other literary modes, both mimetic and didactic. Further, the idea of a fictional encyclopaedia is developed through an understanding of the traits of the neighbouring forms of essay, Menippean satire and epic, and through an understanding of the paradoxes associated with the making of the non-fictional encyclopaedia. The fictional encyclopaedia thus comprehends and exceeds the following traits: 1. A tension, characteristic of the essay, between integrated autobiography and impersonal (and ultimately fragmented) exposition of the categories of knowledge. 2. A tension, characteristic of the Menippean satire, between tale and digression, between a single narrating subject and a multiplicity of transient narrating voices. The menippea also contributes a simultaneous preoccupation with the most sacred and the most profane subjects. 3. A totalizing drive characteristic of the epic, a desire--rivalling the urge to tell a story--to list or include all aspects of the culture in the epic past. The fictional encyclopaedia also translates into fiction the following paradoxes associated with the encyclopaedic enterprise: 1. The recognition, implicit in the drive to trace a complete and eternally-perfect circle of the arts and sciences, that encyclopaedic knowledge is always ultimately incomplete and obsolete. 2. The recognition, at the heart of the attempt to produce an objective and unmediated picture of the world, that encyclopaedic knowledge is ideologically shaped and textually mediated. The dominance of the encyclopaedic gesture in Finnegans Wake, Paradis and the Cantos allows us to account for the characteristic length, obscurity and "bookishness" of these works; they absorb the traits and tensions of essay, Menippean satire and epic while yet exceeding these traits in their fictional translation of the encyclopaedic paradoxes noted above. This translation manifests itself in each work as a characteristic parodic hesitation before the authority of totalizing predecessors; it manifests itself in the texts' fascination with images of a paradisiacal completion and timelessness, a tendency that is undercut by a repetitive, digressive or fragmented form which asserts the inevitability of time and incompletion. Further, the Wake, Paradis and the Cantos, in their overt and extensive intertextual activity, emphasize the textual boundaries of encyclopaedic knowledge. Nonetheless, in their foregrounding and valorization of speech rhythms, the works also repeat the challenge that the encyclopaedia brings to its own limited nature as written book. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate