Blake's Word

Zusatztext

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-hansi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">This book explores how William Blake conceived the act of reading as an imaginative activation of Jesus the Word, the anonymous, unsayable potency of language that underlies speech. Through illuminated printing, Blake sought to incarnate this Word by re-educating his late-Enlightened audience in the fundamentals of reading &ndash; not through morality tales but at the level of physiology and synaesthesia where <span style="color: black; background: white;">seen writing is turned into meaningful mental sounds. By wrongfooting the </span>automaticity of skilled adult parsing, <span style="color: black;">Blake&rsquo;s grammar and syntax</span> restore <span style="color: black;">a </span>cognitive<span style="color: black;"> element of anticipation to semiotic decoding and prophetically open the immediate future to interpretation. Such </span><span style="color: #3b3d3f; background: white;">speaking-forth of the divine unsayability not only </span><span style="color: black;">critiques 18th-century Deism&rsquo;s God-given &ldquo;language of nature,&rdquo; it also sometimes </span><span style="color: #3b3d3f; background: white;">skirts unreadability. Therefore, as this study demonstrates, Blake strove hard to develop his reading program in relation to a range of well-known philosophers including Plato and Bacon, Berkeley and Hume, Swedenborg and Rousseau, whose ideas on cognition and language his work casts in a new light even today. </span></span></p>

Autorenportrait

<p class="MsoNormal"><strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Andrew M. Cooper </span></strong><span lang="EN-GB">retired from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, in 2013. His most recent books are <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Bastard Kind of <em>Reasoning</em>: William Blake and Geometry </em>(2023) and <em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">William Blake and the Productions of Time</em> (2013).</span></p>

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