PAIDEUMA

A neologism derived from the Greek and borrowed by Ezra Pound from the work of German ANTHROPOLOGIST Leo Frobenius, ‘paideuma’ designates the deep-rooted ideas and moods specific of a historical moment. Characterised by its complexity and locality in time and space, it is akin to the Romantic zeitgeist, but Pound uses a different term to add a dynamic dimension to the notion: far from being passively absorbed, ‘paideuma’ is at the roots of ‘ideas that are in action’ (Pound 1952: 58). It is constantly being actualised into a combination of behaviours that could be deliberately changed. Thus ‘paideuma’ is closely tied to Pound's volitionist approach to culture in the 1938 Guide to KULCHUR. His interest in the concept also lies in its etymological relation to paideutics, the science or art of learning and education. For Pound, ‘paideuma’ is part of a general didactic project that is embodied in the variety of his writings, from the prose of the political and economic essays to the poetic arcanes of the Cantos. From Frobenius then, Pound derives a pedagogy based on a morphology of culture that he rewrites into his theory of the luminous detail. Paideuma is also the title of the journal devoted to Pound scholarship published by the National Poetry Foundation (University of Maine at Orono) since 1972.

READING

Pound, Ezra (1952) Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions.

Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P. (ed.) (2005) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

PARATAXIS

Although the term itself is drawn from classical rhetoric, naming the grammatical arrangement of words, phrases or clauses in sequence but without the presence of connecting terms, parataxis has been seen by critics as a characteristic technique of modernist and EXPERIMENTAL literature. At the level of the sentence the effect of the lack of conjunctions is to leave unclear relations between phrases, where we might expect a text to indicate hierarchies of significance, cause and effect or even temporal sequence. Techniques such as COLLAGE, the juxtaposition of unexpected or unrelated images, and repetition might all be described as paratactic. In the critical writing of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, parataxis is attributed particular significance as a technique which suspends some traditional expectations of philosophical or discursive prose, in which the subject under discussion is subordinated to the logical and narrative unfolding of an argument.