The American Modernism's Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Transatlantic Literatures

by Daniel Katz

This study takes as its point of departure an essential that the widespread phenomenon of expatriation in American modernism is less a flight from the homeland than a dialectical return to it, but one which renders uncanny all tropes of familiarity and immediacy which 'fatherlands' and 'mother tongues' are traditionally seen as providing. In this framework, similarly totalising notions of cultural authenticity are seen to govern both exoticist mystification and 'nativist' obsessions with the purity of the 'mother tongue.' At the same time, cosmopolitanism, translation, and multilingualism become often eroticised tropes of violation of this model, and in consequence, simultaneously courted and abhorred, in a movement which, if crystallised in expatriate modernism, continued to make its presence felt beyond.Beginning with the late work of Henry James, this book goes on to examine at length Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, to conclude with the uncanny regionalism of mid-century San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, and the deterritorialised aesthetic of Spicer’s peer, John Ashbery. Through an emphasis on modernism as a space of generalized interference, the practice and trope of translation emerges as central to all of the writers concerned, while the book remains in constant dialogue with key recent works on transnationalism, transatlanticism, and modernism.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Daniel Katz (born 1938 in Helsinki) is a Jewish-Finnish writer.

He is a graduate of the University of Helsinki in the Humanities. He worked as a Jewish history teacher at the Jewish School in Helsinki, and in Haifa Israel as a driller on subway construction.

He writes in Finnish. His first commercially successful novel, Kun isoisä Suomeen hiihti (When Grandfather Skied to Finland), is a humorous description of Katz's family history and Finland's entry into World War II. As an ethnic minority writer, Katz has written as an outsider regarding life in Finland. He has been awarded and been a finalist for the J. H. Erkko Award (debut novel), Runeberg Prize and others.

Katz has four children, including Dunja Katz and the musician Kalle Katz. He lives in Loviisa, Finland.