Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock

The material elements of writing have long been undervalued; but analysis of these elements--sound signature letters--can transform our understanding of major texts. Tom Cohen argues in this book that in an era of representational criticism the role of close reading has been overlooked. Through astonishing new readings of writers such as Plato Bakhtin Poe Whitman and Conrad Professor Cohen exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism and demonstrates how the materiality of language challenges representational models of meaning imposed by the canon.