Amy is an English major concentrating in 20th and 21st Century literature. She is also an editorial assistant for Jacket2 Magazine, a staffer at the Kelly Writers House, and a co-president for Penn Colleges Against Cancer, which fundraises on campus for the American Cancer Society. 

Making it New and Old

Pound’s mantra, “Make it new,” implies that, just important as the ‘new,’ there is a more constant and historical ‘it.’ Therefore, one is lead to ask if modernism was really more rooted in the ‘now’ than the movements before it that manipulated this ‘it’ to their own historical, political, and artistic purposes. After completing a data-driven analysis, the results will be enriched with close readings, perhaps looking at trends that develop in the data surrounding certain poets or years. The goal of this project is to have a deeper understanding of the ‘nowness’ of modernism at the completion of the project, suspecting that it is a more historical movement than it wants to claim or admit.