A Thing about Language

Postmodern poet and critic Gerald Burns bridges the gap between the experimental writing of the 19th-century Romantics and the early 20th-century modernists. As Burns says, many of the pieces collected here "enact what they do--to save time." Only one is a formal lecture. Three began as book reviews and the rest are prose records of investigations that are informed by a much richer historical sense--a broader horizon of thinking and writing--than is usually found in modern writing on meaning, reference, and language as the medium of art.