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SPEECH MADE UNABLE: INEXPRESSIBILITY, SUBLIMITY, AND NOTHINGNESS IN KING LEAR AND ITS RECEPTION By JAMES TRYGVE NEWLIN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 James Trygve Newlin 2 To Trygve Tonnessen, my grandfather 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Appropriately enough for a study attentive to failure and problems of expression, this dissertation is the result of many false starts, detours, and drafts. I am grateful to the many colleagues, family members, and friends whose support and encouragement made completion possible. I owe an enormous debt to my dissertation committee. I thank my chair, Richard Burt, and my readers, R. Allen Shoaf, Terry Harpold, and Eric Kligerman. This project is the result of not only their suggestions, but also their inspiration. I am also grateful to the English department at the University of Florida for offering a supportive intellectual atmosphere, and for providing opportunities to complete and present my work. I was able to complete this project thanks to the funding awarded from the Graduate Student Award fellowship, and was able to present early drafts at conferences thanks to additional travel funds awarded by the department and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I am as grateful for these awards as I was fortunate to receive them. I owe thanks to my many teachers at UF: Sidney L. Dobrin, Robert B. Ray, James J. Paxson, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Phillip E. Wegner, and Roger Beebe. Thanks as well to Pamela K. Gilbert, Kenneth B. Kidd, John P. Leavey Jr., Scott Nygren, and Maureen Turim. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Peter L. Rudnytsky. In more than six years at UF, I have been fortunate to meet and befriend many fellow graduate students who have inspired and challenged me. I am proud to call the following scholars and artists my colleagues: Kelly Adams, Patricia Auxier, Thomas Cole, Anthony Coman, Kristin Denslow, Nathaniel Deyo, Kelly Dunn, Christopher Garland, Christopher Hazlett, Gary Hink, Jennifer Kahn, Aaron Kashtan, Carolyn Kelley, Patrick LeMieux, Francesca Lyn, Velina Manolova, Regina Martin, Michael Mayne, Gabriel Mayora, Emily McCann, 4 Melissa Molloy, Jacob Riley, Craig Rinne, Allison Rittmayer, Rachel Robinson, Timothy Robinson, Randy Romano, Michael Rowin, Robert Short, Caroline Stone Short, Horacio Sierra, Erich Simmers, Chad Sims, Ellen Snead, Matthew Snyder, Garrett Strobel, Jason Stuart, Kiren Valjee, and Jenna Wood. Thanks and apologies to anybody that I have forgotten to mention. Thank you as well to everyone involved in the English Graduate Organization (EGO) and Graduate Assistants United (GAU). I presented early drafts of these chapters at conferences in Gainesville, Staunton, and Toronto. I thank the organizers, attendees, and fellow panelists at conferences hosted by UF‘s English Graduate Organization, the American Shakespeare Center, the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts, and the Shakespeare Association of America. I thank my family, particularly my parents, Jeffrey and Virginia Newlin, my brother Peter Newlin, and my sister, Kirsten Newlin. I simply would not have attended graduate school without the encouragement and generosity of my grandfather, Trygve Tonnessen. I have dedicated this dissertation to him as a sign of my gratitude. Finally, I am most grateful for the support, encouragement, and love of Erica Crump. The most rewarding moment of the last six-and-a-half years at UF was meeting her. I am proud to become not just Dr. Newlin, but also to become one of the Drs. Newlin. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................9 2 KING LEAR IN ROMANTIC CRITICAL THEORY: THE RHETORIC OF EXAMPLE IN COLERIDGE AND SHELLEY ........................................................................................35 3 KING LEAR IN ROMANTIC CRITICAL PRACTICE: TOPOI OF INEXPRESSIBILITY IN HAZLITT AND LAMB ...............................................................69 4 KING LEAR IN POST-ROMANTIC THOUGHT: RESTAGING LEAR IN KIERKEGAARD‘S INDIRECT COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALS .......................106 5 KING LEAR AND CLINICAL PRACTICE: READING LEAR AGAIN WITH JACQUES LACAN ..............................................................................................................147 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................199 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................218 6 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy SPEECH MADE UNABLE: INEXPRESSIBILITY, SUBLIMITY, AND NOTHINGNESS IN KING LEAR AND ITS RECEPTION By James Trygve Newlin December 2013 Chair: Richard Burt Major: English In this dissertation, I examine the role that King Lear plays as a paradigm for the discourse of the Sublime in British Romanticism. I argue that this rhetorical move misrecognizes the play‘s famous, difficult conceptualization of nothingness, and that the more radical attention paid to the play by Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan begins to offer a corrective to this misrecognition. The British Romantics‘ praise of King Lear should be understood in terms of epideixis, the branch of classical rhetoric dedicated to arguments of display (generally, praise and blame). In their epideictic readings of Lear, the Romantics do not only praise the play, but seek to re- display the play. Examining the works of Shelley, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, I identify the Romantics‘ conventional praise of King Lear as an instance of psychological defense. In a critical reaction formation, the Romantics invoke conventions of classical rhetoric—exempla, the topoi of inexpressibility and outdoing—in order to decry classical rhetoric as a mode of sublimity. In the second half of the dissertation, I examine the attention paid to Lear by two post- Romantic thinkers: the philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard, and the psychoanalyst, 7 Jacques Lacan. Kierkegaard and Lacan‘s rhetorical orientation, unlike the Romantics‘, is founded upon recognition, rather than display. The references to Lear in Kierkegaard‘s ―indirect communication‖ and in the transcriptions of Lacan‘s seventh seminar indicate an interrogation of Romantic critical ideals. However, even Kierkegaard and Lacan respond anxiously to the play‘s nihilistic vision. Examining the history of defensive readings of King Lear is more than just a curiosity for literary historians; it illuminates the play‘s distinctive traumatic narrative. My primary concern in this dissertation is a clearer understanding of Shakespeare‘s masterpiece and what I identify as its crisic core. I read the reception history of Lear as prefigured by the play itself: the complicated praise of Lear in the first scene of the play redoubled as literary history‘s complicated praise of Lear. The crises of recognition that we experience reading King Lear are authored by Shakespeare, in much the same way that an analyst enables a transference. 8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In his often-blistering critique of the ―Romantic ideology,‖ Jerome McGann notes, ―today, the scholarship and interpretation of Romantic works is dominated by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism‘s own self-representations‖ (137). Justin Clemens has recently leveled a variant of this charge at all post-structuralist literary theory: ―contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic . despite all attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought‖ (iix).1 Given the centrality that Shakespeare plays for literary criticism authored by the Romantics, Shakespeare studies may benefit from examining the presence of aesthetic attitudes ―bequeathed‖ by Romanticism in our own field. I hope that this dissertation contributes to such an analysis. Though this project is similarly critical of what John Keats, following William Hazlitt, dubbed the ―egotistical sublime‖ (Selected Letters 147),2 its scope is considerably more confined than that of Romanticism or contemporary theory as a whole. Instead, my interest is limited to the Romantic reception of a single play. In this dissertation, I examine the role that King Lear plays as a rhetorical exemplum for the Romantic discourse of the Sublime, how such a rhetorical move misrecognizes the play‘s conceptualization of nothingness, and how the more radical, post- Romantic thought of Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan begins to offer a corrective to this 1 Clemens‘s argument follows upon critiques made by the contemporary French philosopher, Alain Badiou, whose work Clemens has championed and translated. In Clemens‘s estimation, ―much of the force of Badiou‘s work depends on the distance that he takes from Romanticism‖ (192). In brief, Badiou opposes the open-ended, self- conscious ignorance of sublimity (discussed below) with the more scientific study of infinite values and quantities offered by set theory. See Badiou ―Philosophy

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