Joyce, Rabelais, and Plutarch: The Deaths of Parnell and Pan (original) (raw)
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In his pioneering rethinking of received attitudes about autobiography, Paul de Man (1984) lays bare the tropological structure of referentiality operative in, and constitutive of, every autobiographical discourse. The logic of tropes, while being potentially restorative, is, de ...
It is unlikely, were The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written by Wordsworth, that its central figure would have suffered so miserably. As a Kantian in a far stricter sense than Coleridge, Wordsworth may have been more sympathetic to a figure whose only crime was an act of radical self-assertion amidst a literal sea of externalities. What Keats called the ‘egotistical sublime’ (Keats 2006: 1375) of Wordsworth is not apparent in the Unitarian Coleridge, whose method of obtaining the sublime is always one of deferral and absorption before assertion and personal transcendence. In this essay, I aim to read the crime and subsequent punishment of the mariner as a problematisation, never entirely resolved, of the Coleridgean moral ontology and its relation to Coleridge’s variant of the sublime. The main theoretical framework I will be using to unpack this reading is the theory of subjectivisation developed by Jacques Lacan, in particular his use of the concepts of subject, Other and alienation. Over the course of the essay I will deploy a reading of the narrative as indicative of the subject’s severance from and progressive re-assimilation into the Other, a process which is at once arduous, inevitable and ultimately incomplete by the poem’s conclusion.