Volume-XII, Special Issue, April 2026 |
Media, Propaganda, and the Intellectual: Re-Reading Ezra Pound in the Age of Neo-Fascism Debolina Chaulay, Research Scholar Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam, India |
Received: 07.04.2026 | Accepted: 09.04.2026 | Published Online: 10.04.2026 | Page No: 419-424 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.specialW.299 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
In this paper, an explicit praise of the war-time propaganda and support of Benito Mussolini by Ezra Pound is re-read not as the bizarre deviation of a modernist genius but as a constituent of an ideological creation with immediate contemporary significance. In a time when the authoritarian leaders of all forms of democracy have come back, the case of Pound presents a critical approach to studying how intellectuals turn crisis into authoritarian desire by aestheticizing it, how media is turned into a means of propaganda, and how literary prestige itself may serve as an ideological disguise. Based on the theory of the aestheticization of politics by Walter Benjamin, Matthew Feldman as an archival theorist, and the recorded history of Pound in the Italian neo-fascist movement, CasaPound Italia, the paper contends that the Fascist activity of Pound was not a peripheral part of his aesthetics but a structural part of it. The paper further suggests that the modern revival of authoritarian populism reinstates exactly the process that Pound enacted: transformation of economic and cultural crisis into spectacle and spectacle into political will. | ||
Keywords: Ezra Pound, fascism, propaganda, Walter Benjamin, aestheticization of politics, neo-fascism, CasaPound, authoritarian populism, modernism, media |