Breaking Up the Language: The Struggle With(in) Modernity in J.H. Prynne’s Biting the Air

The essays focuses on J. H. Prynne’s Biting the Air. Taking as a departure point Adorno’s idea of the role of art in society, it is argued here that Prynne’s sequence of poems thematises a conflict between the supremacy of the science- and market-oriented narratives of suppression of society and the attempts to subvert that narrative through a reinvention of the signifying process of language. Prynne resorts to radical parataxis in order to undermine the ostensibly natural hegemony of accepted idioms of science and market economy, offering a dense network of meanings that cannot be reduced to a flat formula.