Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies) - Softcover

McCaffery, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810117908 ISBN 13: 9780810117907

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Prior to Meaning collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.

About this title

About the Author

STEVEN McCAFFERY is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo (Amherst). McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull. He moved to Toronto in 1968. In 1970, he began to collaborate with fellow poets Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and bpNichol, forming the sound-poetry group, The Four Horsemen. McCaffery's poetry attempts to break language from the logic of syntax and structure to create a purely emotional response. He has created three-dimensional structures of words and has released a number of sound and video works, often in collaboration with other poets.

Reviews

A long-awaited follow-up to the Canadian poet's first volume of criticism, North of Intention (recently in reprint from Roof Books), Steve McCaffery's Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics doesn't disappoint. With rigor and a spellbinding range of reference, McCafferey explores language as it operates beyond the control of the conscious reader or writer. Whether sussing out the relationship of Milton editor Richard Bentley to postructuralism, or of prosodic master Joshua Steele to Derrida's Grammatology, or looking beneath the surfaces of figures like Sade, Jackson Mac Low, Charles Olson and Emmanuel Levinas (for whom ethical relations with the "other" are negotiated in the space of a grapheme). While heavily polysyllabic, the book offers the attentive reader with an interest in radical poetic theory a wealth of rapid insights.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810117908
• ISBN 13: 9780810117907
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 339