What Language for Prophets and/or Loss

Jerome McGann’ s work is a pataparodic reflection on William Blake’ s visionary Menippean satire The Marriage and Heaven and Hell, where Blake skewered the thought and practice of his period’ s secular and sacred Enlightenments. Having grown a public address more blind and indigent than even Blake imagined, contemporary regimes of our Modernity are here called to an outrageous comic accounting staged as a set of relentless language games and prosepoetic Nonsense. A gallery of arresting never-neverland illuminations by the artist Arthur Kennickell, nearly all -- but, significantly, not all -- created specifically for this work, open fresh doors of perception into what Blake’ s and McGann’ s works set out to do. What Language for Prophets and/or Loss is a more synoptic act of “ transubstantiation” than the selections that appeared last year in McGann’ s Transubstantiations, also published by Station Hill Press.