Title: Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot
Abstract: ROMANTIC POETRY AND THE FRAGMENTARY IMPERATIVE: SCHLEGEL, BYRON, JOYCE, BLANCHOT. By Christopher A. Strathman. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 204. ISBN 0-7914-6457-1. $60.00. Christopher A. Strathman's Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative explores the centrality of Friedrich Schlegel's notions of irony and 'romanticisch poesie' to German Romantic theory and British Romantic practice. Strathman recognises the difficulty of policing these categories as 'such a distinction between theory and practice is problematic as romantic theory is very much informed by early modern European, especially English, practice'. This typifies Strathman's ability to present theoretical complexity with great clarity and insight without recourse to the jargon favoured by some literary theorists. Read through Schlegel's 'call for a new and highly self-conscious literary work that embodies the fractured, decentred consciousness of ancient dialogue', Strathman conceives of Romantic poetry as derived from an anti-Aristotelian philosophical genealogy that 'look[s] back through Plato and Socrates to pre-Socratic writing, the tragic chorus, and Homer, while at the same time looking forward to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the twentieth-century avant-garde'. Strathman champions intellectual history and formal qualities over the historicity of material fact and circumstance - the approach favoured by Marjorie Levinson's The Romantic Fragment Poem (1986) - and finds a closer affinity with Thomas McFarland's Heideggerian outlook in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin (1981), Balachandra Rajan's The Form of the Unfinished (1985) and Anne Janowitz's English Ruins (1990). Strathman's reassessment of the genre of Romantic fragment and fragmentary writing in light of these philosophical and formal concerns also provides a timely and welcome addendum to Susan Wolfson's recent work on the poetic forms of British Romanticism in Formal Charges (1997). Strathman shares Maurice Blanchot's sense that those gestures of 'fragmentary writing' towards a 'transhistorical linguistic idealism' are 'better understood [as] a kind of passage [] outside of the dualism of self and other into an unsettled and unsettling region'. Like pre-Socratic sophistry, Romantic fragments and fragmentary texts demand an open-ended, ceaseless, 'back-and-forth movement' that resists closure to 'keep oneself open and moving on'. By revitalising 'the idea (embedded within Plato's dialogues) of the fragmentary work [as] dialogue', Strathman traces a literary and philosophical line of influence from the English writings of Laurence Sterne and the ideas of German Romanticism to the British Romantic project of Byron's Don Juan, James Joyce's modernist experimentations 'at the limits of Romantic poetry' and, finally, Blanchot's postmodernist encounters with Friedrich Nietzsche and historical crisis. …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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