Synopses & Reviews
When works such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Stein's Tender Buttons were first introduced, they went so far beyond prevailing linguistic standards that they were widely considered "unreadable," if not scandalous. Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery take these and other examples of twentieth-century avant-garde writing as the starting point for a collection of writings that demonstrates a continuum of creative conjecture on language from antiquity to the present. The anthology, which spans three millennia, generally bypasses chronology in order to illuminate unexpected congruities between seemingly discordant materials. Together, the writings celebrate the scope and prodigality of linguistic speculation in the West going back to the pre-Socratics.
Review
"What Rasula and McCaffery have accomplished is to put together an astonishing and unprecedented assemblage of the multiple ways in which language has been used or been conceptualized in relation to reality. Imagining Language is a continuous revelation."
—Jerome Rothenberg, Poet, Professor of Visual Arts and Literature, the University of California, San Diego
Review
"Imagining Language is both anthology and sourcebook—an encyclopedia of the potential, whether secular or spiritual, of the written letter, morpheme, and word."
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Stanford University, and author of Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
About the Author
Jed Rasula is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.Steve McCaffery is David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo, New York.