Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology by Kathleen Lundeen (Susquehanna University Press) William Blake's agility as an intermedia artist is indisputable. Though his individual works have often been classified according to the dominant medium in which they have been executed, his unrestricted movements among the arts of sketching, watercolor, printmaking, and poetry demonstrate his disregard of the conventional aesthetic parameters that are thought to separate one medium from another. Though Blake is just as unapologetic in trespassing the boundaries between here and the hereafter, most who celebrate the principle of free?play in his art squirm at his professed practice of the same principle in his life. His alleged sightings of spirits have by and large embarrassed his admirers, many of whom have chosen to look the other way. Blake's liberal experiments in mediumship, nevertheless, raise an intriguing question: is there a correlation between his textual and his spiritualistic practices? This study offers an answer.
In Knight of the Living Dead, Lundeen investigates Blake's work in the context of his spiritualistic practices, and shows how he attempts to create a discourse that circumvents the binary of natural and arbitrary signs. Her examination of his word?image art demonstrates that, in Blake's view, what we recognize as word or image depends upon our epistemological orientation, just as what we term "matter" or "spirit" is determined by our state of perception. It further shows how Blake critiques textual theory in both his songs and prophecies by stabilizing the two sets of parameters that are used to define and classify signs: the general and particular, and the literal and figurative. Moreover, she argues, Blake provides an epistemological alternative to empiricism and rationalism in his poetry and art. Through verbal and visual experiments he defies the logic that is rooted in sense perception and reason, and he attempts through those experiments to return textuality to a divinely literal condition. By treating spiritualism as an aesthetic practice and art as an otherworldly communication, he undermines the institutionalized boundaries in art and life, and presents a formidable challenge to the whole matter/spirit dualism upon which Western culture is based.
An Excerpt from Knight of the Living Dead: We see just how closely affiliated the verbal and spiritual realms were to Blake in his memorable comment to Crabb Robinson: "I write . . . when commanded by the spirits and the moment I have written I see the words fly abot [sic] the room in all directions?It is then published & the Spirits can read." It is common enough for an artist to claim that his work is aided by spiritual intervention of one sort or another, but to suggest that one's art is directed toward otherworldly beings leaves earthly readers in a predicament. How are we to respond to art for which we have been deemed by the artist ontologically unfit? Blake's lifelong problem of getting his work published might in part be due to his choice of readership. Writing for spirits may demonstrate one's artistic range, but it is somewhat imprudent from a business standpoint ....
Though I will not presume to reconstruct Blake's interpretive community, it might be closer to home than we realize. Heaven, to Blake, was a mode of perception=`tho it appears Without it is Within / In your Imagination"?and archangels, those who sympathized with his artistic endeavors .... [In a letter] he writes, "You O Dear Flaxman are a Sublime Archangel My Friend & Companion from Eternity." Such a rhetorical gesture mitigates the mysticism of his remarks about spiritual beings, but those remarks cannot be dismissed as mere hyperbole. The celestial referents in his writing are neither wholly literal nor wholly figurative. His language cannot be situated on the familiar tropological axis since his perception does not synchronize with a dualistic metaphysics. To Blake, the archangel Flaxman was as otherworldly as the archangel Gabriel was tangible since he regarded matter and spirit, not as polar realities but as different states of perception.

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This book applied very on target approaches for integrating writing across the curriculum. Strategies were not busy work, but rather in depth and applicable for a variety of learning styles as well as populations.