Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
Loading next page...
/lp/university-of-pennsylvania-press/what-is-called-corporeal-william-blake-and-the-question-of-the-body-iE42jmjuiE
References
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Pennsylvania Press
- ISSN
- 1935-0201
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
Erin M. Goss Loyola University Maryland I question not my Corporeal or vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it what is Calld Corporeal nobody knows of its Dwelling Place --William Blake1 The essay that follows finds in William Blake's narration of bodily origin an interrogation of the body's status in relation to the language that seems to describe it. Blake's early poem The [First] Book of Urizen (1794) depicts the body as an assertion that seeks to answer a question that cannot be answered and suggests the impossible identity between the nominal body and the material body. The interrogation of "what is Calld Corporeal" in this early poem suggests that the nominally corporeal and the ontologically corporeal are indistinguishable. What is called corporeal becomes all that can be understood to be corporeal, and the possibility of differentiating between a material and a linguistic body becomes null. The narrative of bodily genesis locates the body somewhere uncomfortably between the discursively constructed and the ontologically extant, foregrounding the degree to which the body refuses to cohere on one side or the other of the question. Blake
Journal
The Eighteenth Century – University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Dec 31, 2010