Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Back to Basics
Robert Scholes

Preface: In a Station
David Ben-Merre

Introduction

1. Pounding the Academy: The Poet as Student and Teacher

2. The Critic as Teacher: Pound's "New Method" in Scholarship

3. How to Read Comparatively

4. Periodical Studies

5. The Instructor as Propagandist

Afterword: Schools of Fish
David Ben-Merre

Notes
Works Cited
Index

About the Author

Robert Scholes (1929–2016) was Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Brown University. A prolific author, his books include In Search of James Joyce and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. David Ben-Merre is Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State College, State University of New York. He is the author of Figures of Time: Disjunctions in Modernist Poetry, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"Scholes and Ben-Merre offer thoughtful close readings of key texts in which Pound articulated his theories of teaching and learning." — James Joyce Quarterly

"Super Schoolmaster provides an alert and informed review of an important feature in Ezra Pound's poetic career—the wish to teach the values of culture to a huge audience, in fact as many people as possible, which takes us from his vision for a new form of pedagogy to his political delusions of grandeur. In so doing, it also provides a superb conclusion to the critical work of Robert Scholes. In recent decades, Scholes had moved from his early study of semiology and post-structuralism toward historical studies of modernism focused on little magazines and archives. While his scholarly approach and concerns shifted, his work was always reflexive about different modes of learning and their historical stakes for the future of the humanities. All these facets of Scholes's career are visible throughout this posthumous book." — Jean-Michel Rabaté, author of 1913: The Cradle of Modernism