Pound’s Basel connection

In this video Philipp Schweighauser takes you to Basel’s University Psychiatric Clinics and tells you about Ezra Pound’s mysterious connection with this institution, his hospitalization for mental health issues, as well as his visit to James Joyce’s grave in Zürich.

Along the way, your educator will reflect on a problem all historians and literary historians are faced with: how a truthful access to the past is possible via historical sources given that all that we have in many cases are a narrow selection of all the texts that were produced at a given moment in time – texts that are, moreover, not straightforward recordings of objective facts but themselves provide a specific perspective on and interpretation of the past.