User:DeRossitt/The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky

The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky is a 1994 book by poet and critic Bob Perelman.

Overview
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Reception
Roger Gilbert in American Literature: "Perelman is surely right to suggest that these four writers fail to deliver the kind of humane social vision their work at times seems to promise. To blame that failure on an ethos of genius seems plausible; but Perelman remains acutely aware of what that ethos enables creatively. The question of whether great, or even memorable, poetry can be written without some residual allegiance to ideas of genius remains open as Perelman's book ends. In courting the social muse, Perelman and his col- leagues may yet discover a new way to connect poetic innovation with a larger sense of community; or they may simply refine the contradictions of modernism and, before it, romanticism. Either way The Trouble with Genius offers a valuable challenge both to the past and to the present."

Alan Golding in Journal of Modern Literature: "In The Trouble with Genius, Bob Perelman lays out effectively Pound’s simultaneous desire to teach and his suspicion of teaching institutions (“beaneries,” in his notorious term), his contradictory impulses both to exclude and to instruct from his position as self-constructed “genius.” Pound divides readers between the few initiates into the sacred realm of poetry who see by the light of immediate, self-evident truth and the many laboring in dullness, who need poetry’s instruction and yet, because of Pound’s “denial that sacred knowledge can circulate” (Perelman, Trouble 58), are refused it or seen as immune to it."

Tony Tremblay in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics: Here again is the trouble with genius; in seeking to negotiate the maieutics of reception and transmission, genius does not only obscure but impedes, necessitating, again, mediation. Perelman's book, then, is a rich palimpsest of a poet in the throes of just such a negotiation. Its genius, for this reader, lay less in its explication of four notoriously difficult modernists than in its author's visible struggle to muscle his way through the implications or his own thought, much as his four subjects did in constructing their own narrative strategies.

Sarah Ehlers in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics: These critics have productively analyzed the tensions in Pounds work between his distaste for professional pedagogical institutions and his desire to create alternative spaces for teaching and learning.

Johanna Winant in Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics: "sharply, Bob Perelman argues that Pound prefers his readers not to understand his work; this is how Pound maintains power. Referring back to Elioťs comment that Pounds article on Social Credit does not explain the theory to readers, "Elioťs befuddlement with Pounds attempt to explain the good banking practices of the Monte dei Paschi demonstrates Pound's need to establish his authority by means of the reader's incomprehension, as does the opacity of the explanation of Douglas's A+B Theorem quoted earlier" (70). The lack of explanations dovetails, in this reading, with Mussolini's authoritatianism'"

Alan Golding in Shofar: "These questions have been central to Perelman's thinking about Pound since his 1995 critical book The Trouble with Genius: the tensions between general address ("many") and coterie exclusiveness ("only a few") in Pound's sense of audience, whether access to the mysteries of Guide to Kulchur can be learned or is simply somehow given, the relationship between Poundian method and content, between "teaching" and Pound's propensity for passing judgment."

Alan Filreis in The Wallace Stevens Journal: "The first two chapters of The Trouble with Genius (1994) make evident Perelman's debt to the Poundian aesthetic.... Perelman, though troubled by genius, remains decidedly influenced by the Pound era."