Abstract

It has been said of Pound’s great work, the Cantos, that it was not “a poem written from within modern civilization, but a poem about a break with modern civilization and a search for a new basis.” Perhaps the same can be said of Lonergan’s great works, and McShane’s. To use McShane’s phrase, they are great pastmodern works. They attempt to move past the massive impasses of self-neglect so thoroughly and pervasively concretized in the historic flow. They involve a search for a new basis beyond the centuries-long and brutal colonization of the life-world by a warped conceptualism which daily denies that “man by nature is oriented into mystery."