The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author's words, a report on ten years watching of shadows. Collecting the earliest short essays and reviews by a man who was arguably the greatest English-language critic-scholar of the twentieth century, Gnomon not only provides valuable, entertaining, and often scabrous insights into the workings of literature, as well as the books of such modern giants as William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but is itself a cross-section of the the development of Kenner's own body of work, which inits beauty, irreverence, and disregard for convention proves him as much an artist as the men and women he spent his life championing.

The "homemade world" Hugh Kenner describes exists alongside the world of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. While they were laying the international foundations of literary modernism, another modernism far more specifically American was being born in the work of William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kenner deals in turn with each of the six, with the American conditions that shaped them, and with the peculiarly homemade strengths that led to their achievement. "A Homemade World" is a book to stimulate thought, argument, and an altogether fresh consideration of twentieth-century writing.

'Joyce's Voices' is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the ideas that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses.

This volume contains all of the extant letters written to each other by the renowned Joyce scholars, Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, between 1953 and 1984. In these frank letters, we are offered the opportunity to visit the creative process. The letters have been carefully annotated so that we can follow how their ideas are absorbed into their published writings. They do not hesitate to try out ideas on each another and they do not hesitate to express uncomfortable opinions. Their contributions to the common cause spark off each other. This book will be a compulsive read for Joyce scholars, for scholars of literary modernism, and for those interested in the history of literary criticism.

With characteristic flair, Kenner explores the ways Joyce teaches us to read his novel as Joyce taught himself to write it: moving from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the strange and new, from the norms of the nineteenth-century novel to the open forms of modernism.

It was 1976--twenty-five years after R. Buckminster Fuller introduced geodesic domes when literary critic Hugh Kenner published this fully-illustrated practical manual for their construction. Now, some twenty-five years later, "Geodesic Math and How to Use It "again presents a systematic method of design and provides a step-by-step method for producing mathematical specifications for orthodox geodesic domes, as well as for a variety of elliptical, super-elliptical, and other nonspherical contours.
Out of print since 1990, "Geodesic Math and How To Use It "is California's most requested backlist title. This edition is fully illustrated with complete original appendices.

With his customary wit and erudition, one of America's most celebrated and distinguished critics examines the response of literary Modernism to environmental changes caused by technology.
Focusing on Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Beckett, Hugh Kenner explores how inventions as various as the linotype, the typewriter, the subway, and the computer altered the way these writers viewed and depicted the world. Whether discussing Joyce's acute awareness of the nuances of typesetting or Beckett's experiments with a "proto-computer-language," Kenner consistently approaches the works of these authors from fresh angles and offers a wealth of anecdotes and asides that will delight both the general reader and the literary specialist.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

"'All humans, by their nature, ' said Aristotle, 'desire to know.' A special and unparalleled way to know is to simply go where you've never been before. And the key to this quest for knowledge is 'elsewhere.'"
So begins The Elsewhere Community by acclaimed literary critic Hugh Kenner, author of The Pound Era, and himself a living archive of modernism in twentieth-century literature. Kenner traces the quest for elsewhere as it manifests itself in various modes of "travel," from the eighteenth century English tradition of a Grand Tour to the continent, to literary meetings-of-the-mind (Milton's visit to Galileo, T.S. Eliot's to Ezra Pound, Kenner's own visit to Beckett), to today's planet-wide Internet journeys, free from all physical limitations. As he chronicles this Elsewhere Community built of people exploring the unknown, Kenner illuminates how this passion has infused literature, from Homer and Dante to Dickens and Joyce. Kenner frames this unique exploration with a witty rumination on the life of the literary expatriate, fondly recalling his friendships with Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and other twentieth-century literary luminaries. Thus a fascinating intellectual autobiography emerges of Hugh Kenner as critic and chronicler, a man whose own life and work uniquely position him to assess the importance of travel in literary life.
Written with the confidence, grace, and verve that have always characterized Kenner's work, this delightful book is for anyone seeking to understand the irrepressible human urge to travel and to know.

In "Historical Fictions" Hugh Kenner applies his extraordinarily nimble mind and unrivaled style to the alchemy of speech turning into language, language becoming art, and art finally settling down as culture. A variety of literary topics are addressed in forty-three lively, often humorous, and wonderfully informative essays.

With his trenchant, famously entertaining touch, Kenner explores the role of counting in literature (Joyce and St. Augustine shared a preference for the number eleven); the extravagant efforts through the ages to preserve the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" (focusing on Ezra Pound's contributions); and Tom Wolfe's prose through the purple decades (Kenner calls him "the nonchalant master of the neon-piped sentence"). Other writers who fall under Kenner's appraising gaze include Flann O'Brien, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Dante, Leslie Fiedler, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov.

"Hugh Kenner's "The Pound Era" could as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pound (to name a few), Kenner bestrides modern literature if not like a colossus then at least a presence of formidable proportions. A new book by him is certainly an event....A demanding, enticing book that glitters at the same time it antagonizes....""The Pound Era" presents us with an idiosyncratic but sharply etched skeletal view of our immediate literary heritage."--"The New York Times"
"It is notoriously difficult to recognize degrees of pre-eminence among one's near-contemporaries. We talk now of the age of Donne, a label that would have seemed bizarre to Ben Johnson. Will "The Pound Era" seem an appropriate designation, 50 or 100 years hence, for the epoch we think of as 'modern'? Mr. Kenner's brilliantly written book establishes an excellent case for supposing the answer to be 'Yes.'"--"The Economist"
"Mr. Kenner's study...is not so much a book as a library, or better, a new kind of book in which biography, history, and the analysis of literature are so harmoniously articulated that every page has a narrative sense...."The Pound Era" is a book to be read and reread and studied. For the student of modern letters it is a treasure, for the general reader it is one of the most interesting books he will ever pick up in a lifetime of reading."--"National Review"

This pioneering study did much to rehabilitate Erza Pound's reputation after a long period of critical hostility and neglect. Published in 1951, it was the first comprehensive examination of the Cantos and other major works that would strongly influence the course of contemporary poetry. Hugh Kenner, perhaps the preeminent authority on Pound, has written a retrospective preface for the reissue of his famous book, long out of print. James Laughlin, in his foreword, writes that The Poetry of Erza Pound turned the tide not only for its subject but also for his company, New Directions, which first published it in America.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

Creator of the mono-maniacal Wile E. Coyote and his elusive prey, the Road Runner, Chuck Jones has won three Academy Awards and been responsible for many classics of animation featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd. Who better to do Chuck Jones than Hugh Kenner, master wordsmith and technophile, a man especially qualified to illuminate the form of literacy that Jones so wonderfully executes in the art of character animation? A Flurry of Drawings reveals in cartoon-like sequences the irrepressible humor and profound reflection that have shaped Chuck Jones's work. Unlike Walt Disney, Jones and his fellow animators at Warner Brothers were not interested in cartoons that mimicked reality. They pursued instead the reality of the imagination, the Toon world where believability is more important than realism and movement is the ultimate aesthetic arbiter. Kenner offers both a fascinating explanation of cartoon culture and a new understanding of art's relationship to technology, criticism, freedom, and imagination. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Creator of the mono-maniacal Wile E. Coyote and his elusive prey, the Road Runner, Chuck Jones has won three Academy Awards and been responsible for many classics of animation featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd. Who better to do Chuck Jones than Hugh Kenner, master wordsmith and technophile, a man especially qualified to illuminate the form of literacy that Jones so wonderfully executes in the art of character animation? A Flurry of Drawings reveals in cartoon-like sequences the irrepressible humor and profound reflection that have shaped Chuck Jones's work. Unlike Walt Disney, Jones and his fellow animators at Warner Brothers were not interested in cartoons that mimicked reality. They pursued instead the reality of the imagination, the Toon world where believability is more important than realism and movement is the ultimate aesthetic arbiter. Kenner offers both a fascinating explanation of cartoon culture and a new understanding of art's relationship to technology, criticism, freedom, and imagination. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.