Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism

Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism

McGann, Jerome J.

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0691015449
ISBN13: 9780691015446
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Jun 6 1993
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.09 Depth: 9.13
Language: English

English literature, Yeats once noted, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press. Finding this true particularly of modernist writing, Jerome McGann demonstrates the extraordinary degree to which modernist styles are related to graphic and typographic design, to printed letters--black riders on a blank page--that create language for the eye. He sketches the relation of modernist writing to key developments in book design, beginning with the nineteenth-century renaissance of printing, and demonstrates the continued interest of postmodern writers in the visible language of modernism. McGann then offers a philosophical investigation into the relation of knowledge and truth to this kind of imaginative writing.

Exploring the work of writers like William Morris, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Laura Riding and Bob Brown, he shows how each exploits the visibilities of language, often by aligning their work with older traditions of so-called Adamic language. McGann argues that in modernist writing, philosophical nominalism emerges as a key aesthetic point of departure. Such writing thus develops a pragmatic and performative answer to Plato in the matter of poetry's relation to truth and philosophy.

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