THE PROBLEM OF THE SUBLIME IN COLERIDGE AND STEVENS

CARLA MICHELE COOPER, Purdue University

Abstract

This study examines the problem of the sublime in two romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wallace Stevens. It follows Kant's analysis of imaginative judgment as the source of the beautiful and the sublime, but it takes a post-Kantian perspective on imagination insofar as it argues that the sublime is not subordinated to the beautiful. The study argues that the problem of the sublime begins for romantics after the Kantian sublime is stripped of its referents in God and moral reason but still continues to introduce the idea of insufficiency into the given. The work claims both Coleridge and Stevens make an effort to subvert the fundamental antinomy between the beautiful and the sublime through a "third act" of imagination; this effort at romantic synthesis is called the romantic or positive sublime. The study argues that for both Coleridge and Stevens, romantic synthesis depends on an ontological reduction and a repression of the negative sublime which ultimately fail. The work defends the integrity of the negative sublime in each poet on the ground that imagination is the source of competing judgments not the solution to them; it tries to establish a critical ground for the negative sublime, or desire, between skeptical reduction and dogmatic elevation, i.e., without Freud or God.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

Literature

COinS