Title: Talking Coleridge: Three Conversation Poems
Abstract: The topic for this thesis is the status, nature, genealogy and structure of conversation in Coleridge’s writing. While I fold these features into a general rubric of speech and its relationship to writing, it will be my task here to focus that relationship within several historical contexts, through which I will read my primary texts. To delimit a manageable space for myself I have chosen three of Coleridge’s more well known blank verse poems: “The Nightingale,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” and “Eolian Harp.” My goal is to produce a range of historical and linguistic contexts for these poems, which should restore some original sense of ‘conversation’ to the poetry while mapping fresh critical readings and histories geared towards some of the present concerns to the study of Romanticism. My first chapter attempts to place “The Nightingale” within the context of 18 th century ballad revivalism. ‘Conversation’ here takes the form of post-structuralist semiotics, phonemic languages and their critiques of logocentricity. I see the large-scale narrative of ballad revivalism as a social and economic process through which oral poetries become texts, and through which the present confronts and refigures its past. I call this narrative, in its entirety, Literalization, a term I adapt from Pascale Casanova. My reading of “The Nightingale” maps out the formal coding of this story. I attempt to read the themes and argument against the form of the poem, a method that I believe points up the poem’s project to resist its own poetic production. However, I argue that this deconstructive poetics is precisely the effect of “The Nightingale’s” historical situation. As such, I argue that the poem’s resistance is a resistance to history more generally, and to the partcular historical moment in which the poem is composed. My second chapter focuses on the public lecture or monologue as a conversational form. I locate what I call the conversational fetish, the particular oratorical operation which characterizes the format’s disavowal of an implied breakdown in communication between orator and auditor through a ‘turning awry’ from the conversational moment itself, first in a series of lectures delivered by Coleridge in Bristol in 1795, and then reproduce that structure in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” While the lectures focus a literal picture of the ‘turning awry,’ I argue that “Lime-Tree” performs the same movement rhetorically. My third and final chapter takes on Coleridge’s reputation as a talker. Here I identify the recursive structures that govern that myth, and their operations within Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Table Talk. I use “The Eolian Harp,” as a lens through which to study the recursive structure of language in general, which helps to illuminate some of the editorial procedures and aesthetical claims of the Table Talk. Last, I want to use the space of this abstract to suggest something about the structure and style of the thesis itself. While I believe I have identified and argued a through-line, the process in which I wrote this thesis was highly inductive. Because writing tends to generate thinking, I have had to prune a number of insights which were the germs of arguments and observations that remain in the body of the thesis. In relevant, and tangential cases I have relegated these thoughts to a discursive footnote. However, I would encourage my reader to consider these footnotes as always in conversation with the body of the text.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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