Crises of the imagination: Romanticism at the limits of philosophy (Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hoelderlin, Germany, Percy Bysshe Shelley, England, William Wordsworth).

摘要

I begin my dissertation with a reading of Kant, arguing that the crisis of the Subject that Kant initiates, and that romanticism articulates, is different than the one most critics see as central to romanticism's development. Previous readings focus on the role of the imagination in the analytic of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgment. My first chapter, however, argues that the crisis takes place in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , specifically the section on the transcendental Aesthetic. This focus significantly displaces what has hitherto dominated discussion of romanticism's relation to Kant, namely the subject/object divide and its reparation. Instead, I argue that Kant articulates a "transcendence" within the realm of phenomena that is not reducible to a noumenal or conceptual beyond. What results is a very different understanding of the imagination, one that introduces the possibility that it is not, strictly speaking, a faculty of the Subject. Extending this to romanticism, this suggests that something other than the self-identification of the Subject is at stake in romantic "theories" of the imagination as well. Chapter 2, on Holderlin, provides a reading of his late hymn Andenken, arguing that the motif of decision in this poem disarticulates the concept of poetry and the imagination that Heidegger sees at work there. Chapter 3 explores the relation between transcendence and the imagination in Shelley's major prose work The Defense of Poetry, as well as his last great poem "The Triumph of Life." I argue that the prevalent use of the trope of metalepsis complicates the apparently ideal transcendence of the imagination, opening his poetics to a beyond that is irreducible to his purported "idealism." Chapter 4 explores, through a reading of The Prelude, how Wordsworth articulates a poetics of the imagination whose transcendence remains distinct from consciousness. Each chapter not only contributes to an understanding of the poetics of its focal author, but also to a description of how each introduces a multiple, divided limit to philosophical idealism.