Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism

by Jerome J. McGann

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691015446
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/06/1993
Edition description:	1996. Corr. 2nd Printing ed.
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jerome McGann, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is well known for his unique approach to printed texts as historical and physical artifacts. His many books include A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Virginia).

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Preface	xi
	Acknowledgments	xv
	Introduction: Modernism and the Renaissance of Printing, with Particular Reference to the Writing of Yeats, Stein, and Dickinson	3
Part 1	A Revolution of the Word	43
1	"Thing to Mind": The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris	45
2	Composition as Explanation (of Modern and Postmodern Poetries)	76
Part 2	Dichtung und Wahrheit	119
3	The Truth of Poetry. An Argument	121
4	The Poetry of Truth. A Dialogue (on Dialogue)	151
	Afterword	176
	Notes	181
	Index	191