The Secular Grail: Paradigms of Perception

by Christopher Dewdney

Book by Christopher Dewdney

208 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1993

About the author

Christopher Dewdney has served as writer-in-residence at Trent, Western, and York universities. Featured in Ron Mann’s film Poetry in Motion with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Ondaatje, and Tom Waits, Dewdney has presented his groundbreaking poetics across North America and Europe.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short prose fragments speculating about the character and modifications of consciousness in a number of contexts—in the hyper-communicative environment of the city, in the intimacy of the social relationship, in the acts of dreaming or remembering, in neurosis.

There is an emphasis on the notion of strangeness in the work: Dewdney claims, for instance, that the city makes us strangers to the natural world, and that the fictions we tell about ourselves make us strangers to our real selves. Dewdney’s style reflects the theme of strangeness: he comments on familiar experiences, but makes them unfamiliar by conceptualizing them in a manner reminiscent of Roland Barthes or Marshall McLuhan; he employs technical language and analogies from science and psychoanalysis; and he discusses strange experiences—the hallucination, the ghost, the uncanny coincidence.

Acquired Mar 20, 1995
Double Hook Bookstore, Montreal, Quebec