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"The Revolution of the Word: Textual Montage in Ezra Pound's Cantos, Bob Brown's ‘Readies,’ and Young-Hae Chang's Dakota"
Jessica Pressman, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
October 27, 2005

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the digital artists responsible for some of the most innovative electronic literature online, proclaim that their Flash-based Dakota is a “close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.”  This essay accepts the authors’ invitation to read Dakota through the Cantos and in so doing I show how a work of electronic literature achieves the ambitions of its modernist predecessor by adopting Pound’s concept of “super-position,” and adapting it to Flash.  Pound describes “super-position,” in language that anticipates Sergei Eisenstein’s later explanation of cinematic montage, as a technique of placing “one idea set on top of another” (Gaudier-Bzeska [1916] 103).   I call this literary aesthetic “textual montage” and use it as a nexus point for reading Dakota through its identified source material, Pound’s first two cantos, and a little-known avant-garde project to build a reading machine to mechanize textual montage in literature: Bob Brown’s “Readies.”  Brown envisioned “a modern, moving, word spectacle” that would provide “a new reading medium in time with our day.” In 1931 he published Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, a collection of short works by modernist and other avant-garde writers which were intended to be read on the machine; included in the anthology was a poem by Pound.  Reading across this asynchronous triad, I show how a work of electronic literature consciously appropriates Pound’s ambitions for “super-position” through a digital machine that achieves the type of reading experience Brown sought through the Readies -- an aesthetic of textual montage that is both thoroughly new and grounded in a modernist tradition of making it new.