[DOWNLOAD] "Freedom from Blake's Book of Urizen." by Studies in Romanticism # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Freedom from Blake's Book of Urizen.
Author : Studies in Romanticism
Release Date : January 22, 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 240 KB

Description

INCREASINGLY, IN THE PROPHETIC WORKS OF 1791-94 THAT FOLLOWED Songs of Innocence, Blake faced a formal, organizational problem. How to add the structural stiffening of narrative to his displaced, perspectivistic, reflexively ironical symbolism, thereby incorporating into his social critique the explanatory power of a full-blown myth able to stand up against the orthodox view of human weakness as, ultimately, an expression of a metaphysical Mystery, Original Sin--a view gaining renewed strength through conservative reaction to the French Revolution? How to rebut this position, without in the process debasing his symbols to the status of representations liable to reinforce some of the very literalisms he wanted to oppose? He found the answer in The Book of Urizen. Moving beyond lyric and pastoral, Blake here exploits the temporality of storytelling to dramatize the fall of his invented ur-myth into the received Christian one that constitutes the main object of his satire. The gradual convergence of the poem's several subnarratives into a plot able to be seen retrospectively as unified and coherent depicts history as a Whiggish Idea and a Coleridgean Symbol. But it is a symbol and idea readers are invited to reject, for its unity is purchased at the cost of debilitating abstraction from the emotional turmoil of the verse when read forward in real time. What is represented at the level of the outer narrative is a Burkean triumph of legitimization, whereby Urizen's authority becomes established, via the mystifications of the sublime, as the necessary and providential basis for society as it presently exists. At the micro level, however, Blake's continually collapsing rhetoric demonstrates Urizen's power to be a usurpation resulting from a metalepsis or causal reversal that is extremely precarious, inasmuch as it is upheld only through mankind's agonized efforts at self-abnegation. In a countermovement to the process by which Urizen comes to represent himself as a metaphysical absolute, Blake's narrative undergoes a progressive decrescendo, a self-contradictory fall into the facticity of the present.