William Blake And The Productions Of Time

Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Andrew M. Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for spiritual purposes. Through irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia, Blake extended and refined the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost to bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake’s expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science, and anticipated the non-Euclidean geometrics of twentieth-century Modernism.

Focusing on the tension in Blake's poetry between doubt and belief, this book offers a new account of the way Blake's major prophecies work and of the strategies they employ. Offering a radically new reading of Milton and Jerusalem, Otto argues that the autonomous, world-forming imagination is subject to visionary deconstruction. He demonstrates that rather than subordinating existence to perception, the poems attempt to induce their readers to action.

What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry—the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves.

Poetry.

Myth criticism flourished in the mid-twentieth century under the powerful influence of Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. It asserted the need to identify common, unifying patterns in literature, arts, and religion. Although it was eclipsed by postmodern theories that asserted difference and conflict, those theories proved incapable of inspiring solidarity or guiding social action. The Productions of Time argues for a return to myth criticism in order to refine and extend its vision. With the aim of rehabilitating myth criticism for our time, Michael Dolzani sketches an anatomy of the imagination as demonstrated in the total body of its productions, including literature, mythology, the arts, popular culture, and religious and political texts. Dolzani situates a vast panoply of images, character types, plot structures, themes, and genres to better understand their purposes, their recurrences across broad spans of history, and their interrelations. Illustrating the relationship between mythology and history, The Productions of Time proposes a symbolic language as a way of enabling dialogue across ideological and individual differences. Arguing for the ethical and intellectual necessity of conceiving a unifying pattern that transcends differences, The Productions of Time demonstrates that imagination is part of the human inheritance, common to all, not just to poets and mystics.