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Download (8MB) https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Veronika Ruttkay The rhetoric of feeling: S. T. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare and the discourse of philosophical criticism’ Doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Glasgow, Department of English Literature Supervisor: Professor Richard Cronin December 2006 © Veronika Ruttkay 2006 ProQuest Number: 10390611 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10390611 Published by ProQuest LLO (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 f GLASGOW ^ miVERSfTY UlBElARY: Abstract My thesis explores what kind of work is performed by affective terms such as ‘passion’, ‘excitement’, or ‘poetic feeling’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare. While Coleridge might be regarded as a fore-runner of twentieth-century critical trends such as formalism and reader-response criticism, his interest in different forms of emotion in connection with poetry links his thought to theoretical concerns of his own and of the immediately preceding age. I situate Coleridge in the context of British ‘philosophical criticism’ in the second half of the eighteenth century, a critical discourse that had paid particular attention to problems related to the role of feeling in literary language. I argue that Coleridge’s interpretations of Shakespeare and the critical stance they articulated both continued and challenged important aspects of this critical tradition. The Introduction offers an overview of the problem of feeling and (poetic) language in Coleridge’s thought, followed by a definition o f ‘philosophical criticism’, its reliance on Shakespeare and the productive tensions between ‘feeling’ and ‘philosophy’ that characterise it. The Introduction ends with a survey of recent scholarship. I proceed in the first chapter with an analysis of Coleridge’s lectures as ‘performances’, that is, as events grounded in the lecturer’s performance of immediate thought and feeling in front of his audience, generated by his encounters with the Shakespearean text. I argue that Coleridge’s rhetorical awareness in these situations reveals the influence of the New Rhetoric, developed in the second half of the eighteenth century by a number of philosophical critics, who recommended improvisation and argued for the decisive role of the passions in rhetorical persuasion. I end this chapter by suggesting that the ambivalent theatricality of Coleridge’s lectures might be seen as expressing his understanding of the role of criticism and of the theatre in early-nineteenth-century Britain. The second chapter deals with Coleridge’s theory of Shakespearean poetry as expounded in the lectures, focussing especially on ‘passionate’ aspects of language and on the connections Coleridge establishes between these and bodily movement, gesture, tone, and rhythm, as well as ‘embodied’ or ‘performative’ uses of rhetoric. I attempt to show that in these speculations Coleridge is responding to the idea of ‘passionate language’ developed by a number of earlier British philosophical critics, who often demonstrated the work of passion in language through the example of King Lear’s mad speeches. Coleridge’s remarks on the same passages articulate his relationship to their thought, revealing a more complex understanding of the links between passion and imagination, nature and artifice. In the third chapter I continue to explore the ways in which Coleridge extends the scope of the New Rhetorical concept of passionate language by pushing back its pre-established limits. On the one hand, philosophical critics endorsed the notion that the strongest passions were defined by the impossibility of expressing them in language (above all, in the case of grief), and criticised Shakespeare’s Constance for ‘unnatural’ verbosity. On the other, they speculated about wordplay and the pun as verbal figures inconsistent with passion, and therefore as figures out of place in serious drama. Coleridge challenges both of these assumptions, as his comments on Constance’s personifications and his repeated speculations on the pun reveal. In doing so he overturns the established hierarchies of the New Rhetoric and implies the inseparability of passion and its expression through both verbal and bodily ‘symptoms’. Meanwhile, he also re-fashions criticism as ‘sympathetic’ reading, an activity defying formulation, which is capable of responding to and analysing even the most subtle modifications of language and feeling. The fourth chapter compares Coleridge’s often dismissed character criticism with the ‘philosophical analysis’ of character developed by William Richardson, a Scottish philosophical critic whose latest publications appeared at the time of Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare. Here I aim to point out some of the philosophical and moral underpinnings of Richardson’s and Coleridge’s concept of ‘character’, and their respective stances towards passion and analysis. By reconstructing the ‘character’ Coleridge drew of Shakespeare, I show how his idea of the management of the passions is related to poetic ‘embodiment’ in the form of fictitious characters. By comparing Richardson’s and Coleridge’s analyses of Macbeth, I show how both critics stress the pathological aspects of the imagination, and how Coleridge adds to this a strong emphasis on imagination’s healing power through reflection on fiction. While the differences between the two critics may be explained by their different views of the mind, they are also related to their different historical perspectives: Richardson wrote his analysis of Macbeth just before the French Revolution, while Coleridge returned to the play again and again to make sense of the events in France and of the rise and fall of Napoleon. In my discussion, I will sometimes refer to Coleridge’s play Remorse, staged in 1813, that is, in the middle of his lecturing career. Coleridge’s interest in theatre can be recognised throughout his lectures in several of his statements on Shakespeare and passionate language, especially since he often thinks about the expression of feeling as inherently theatrical. In the last chapter I turn to Remorse in order to show how some major concerns of Coleridge’s lectures - with the rhetoric of passion or the analysis of character - appear in his own play, and how his play casts a new light on those concerns. With Remorse, Coleridge crosses the divide between philosophical reading and poetical creation; however, the play also reveals the persistence of philosophy in Coleridge’s work, not only in the form of his grounding assumptions, but also as a problem to be ‘staged’ in drama. By reconstructing Coleridge’s exchanges with earlier philosophical critics - most importantly, with Kames, William Richardson, Alexander Gerard, and Joseph Priestley - 1 intend to highlight aspects of his critical practice that have rarely received sustained attention. In doing so, I also offer an interpretation of the complicated and often ambivalent role of feeling in Coleridge’s criticism. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations of S. T. Coleridge’s Works Introduction 1 Chapter One The performance of criticism 25 Chapter Two The impassioned text: The rhetoric of feeling and Coleridge’s reading of King Lear 51 Chapter Three Interrogating the rhetoric of passion: Personification and the pun in Coleridge and the ‘new rhetoricians’ 99 Chapter Four Framing Symptoms: Treatments of Character by Coleridge and William Richardson 134 Chapter Five Remorse, or the ghost of feeling (coda) 178 Bibliography 203 Acknowledgments I owe the greatest debt to my supervisor Richard Cronin for his unfailing guidance and support throughout my doctoral research. Without his great energy of thought, careful attention, trust, and understanding, this thesis would not have been written. I would also like to thank Nicola Trott and Nigel Leask who both read earlier versions of individual chapters of my thesis and gave valuable advice on how they could be improved. I am also indebted to other members of the English Department at the University of Glasgow, Alex Benchimol, Donald Mackenzie, Dorothy McMillan, and Janet Todd, who allowed me to participate in their graduate seminars in the year 2003-4, and to Alice Jenkins, Alison Chapman, and John
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