Overview

Inspired by Dante and William Blake, Secular Revelations is the third and final book of the long poem Comedy. Still in the form of a waking dream, this volume is a meditation on paradise, not as a transcendent place but as an expression of human experience and desire. It consists of poetic dialogues, some with the spirits of well-known artists and philosophers (Richard Wright, John Lennon, Norman O. Brown, Michael Cimino, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Marlon Brando), others with more personal contacts. In an autobiographical mode, this book is a journey through the places, mostly real, in which the author underwent intellectual transformations. Critical motifs in this book are references and allusions to cinema (as in Book 2) and to popular music from the blues to rock-and-roll. There are some satirical and dystopian visions of the future, but the goal of the poem is the affirmation of the power of the human multitude to continue a permanent struggle against that which subverts infinite truth procedures, such as freedom, justice, and democracy. It presupposes that every human mind incorporates the living and the dead in one immeasurable mental process.

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"""This third volume powerfully and beautifully concludes Patrick McGee's profound Comedy, confirming that this comprehensively erudite and authentically accessible text is a definitive epic for our time and all time. McGee has skillfully and fluently mastered and adapted Dante's and Blake's epic perspectives to our contemporary world by placing them in structural and conceptual dialogue with one another and also with contemporary critical theory and popular culture. This deeply thoughtful and richly insightful conversation of past with present gives us a new and credible vision of hope for the human future."" --Laura Haigwood, professor emerita of English, Saint Mary's College"

Author Information

Patrick McGee is professor emeritus from Louisiana State University. He is the author of nine previous critical studies and the first two books of Comedy, Archival Resurrections and Cinematic Revolutions. He currently lives in Seattle.

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