Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Pound and Joyce, Is Dead at 80 (original) (raw)
Arts|Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Pound and Joyce, Is Dead at 80
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- Nov. 25, 2003
Hugh Kenner, the critic, author and professor of literature regarded as America's foremost commentator on literary modernism, especially the work of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, died yesterday at his home in Athens, Ga. He was 80.
He had been suffering from heart problems, his wife, Mary Anne Kenner, said.
The variety of Mr. Kenner's interests was contained in 25 books of his own (he contributed to 200 more) and nearly 1,000 articles, as well as broadcasts and recordings. He wrote commandingly on everything from Irish poetry to geodesic math and Li'l Abner's pappy (Lucifer Ornamental Yokum), to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer (one of which he built for himself and then wrote the user's guide) and the animated cartoons of Chuck Jones.
But it was for his pioneering guide to English-language literary modernism and for his books ''Dublin's Joyce'' (1956), ''The Pound Era'' (1971) and ''Joyce's Voices'' (1978) that Mr. Kenner was best known. In these works and others he employed the techniques proposed by the writers themselves to define new standards by which to judge their work.
In ''The Pound Era,'' perhaps his masterwork, he tried to show how the American expatriate poet absorbed the altered sense of time created by Einstein's revolution and helped to pass it on to artists like Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, William Carlos Williams and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
While some faulted Mr. Kenner for attributing to Pound too much prominence in the scheme of modern art, no one failed to be impressed by the vigor and importance of Mr. Kenner's analysis.
In a 1988 review of ''A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers,'' the critic Richard Eder wrote in The Los Angeles Times: ''Kenner doesn't write about literature; he jumps in, armed and thrashing. He crashes it, like a party-goer who refuses to hover near the door but goes right up to the guest of honor, plumps himself down, sniffs at the guest's dinner, eats some and begins a one-to-one discussion. You could not say whether his talking or his listening is done with greater intensity.''
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