Tenants in the House of Language: English Romantic Authorship
| Thesis title in Czech: | Nájemníci v domě jazyka: autorství v anglickém romantismu |
|---|---|
| Thesis title in English: | Tenants in the House of Language: English Romantic Authorship |
| Key words: | autorství|romantický autor|anglický romantismus|Samuel T. Coleridge |
| English key words: | authorship|the Romantic author|English Romanticism|Samuel T. Coleridge |
| Academic year of topic announcement: | 2019/2020 |
| Thesis type: | diploma thesis |
| Thesis language: | angličtina |
| Department: | Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK) |
| Supervisor: | Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D. |
| Author: | hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept. |
| Date of registration: | 18.10.2019 |
| Date of assignment: | 21.10.2019 |
| Administrator's approval: | not processed yet |
| Confirmed by Study dept. on: | 24.10.2019 |
| Date and time of defence: | 03.06.2021 00:00 |
| Date of electronic submission: | 11.05.2021 |
| Date of proceeded defence: | 03.06.2021 |
| Submitted/finalized: | committed by student and finalized |
| Opponents: | PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D. |
| Guidelines |
| There was a shift in meaning of the concept of literary authorship in Romanticism. “The author” started to denote a subjectivity as the originator of the text. In terms of reasons for this conceptual shift, critics and historians speak of the emergence of the concept of the Self accompanied by the Kantian paradigmatic reassessment of the epistemological role of subjectivity and by expansion of the Idealist Weltanschauung. Moreover, there are more pragmatic reasons, such as the emerging copyright law and accompanying individualist ideology employed in the publishing industry. Throughout the history of criticism, the Romantic author (or Romantic authorship) became a concept denoting a subjectivist image of authorship, where text is a product of the author’s subjectivity solely. The concept of Romantic authorship is often associated with originality, authenticity, individualism, and profound subjectivism.
The thesis will attempt to deconstruct the concept of Romantic authorship and demonstrate that Romantic ideas about authorship were less subjectivist (and more complex and even contradictory) than criticism often suggests. Presenting a historicizing view on the concept of the Romantic author, I argue that the nature of the concept authorship in Romanticism was contested (as opposed to outright subjectivist) and that the subjectivist concept of Romantic authorship as it is used in criticism was established in the critical debates of the 20th century. I will examine Romantic notions about authorship on the background of contemporary philosophical debates about the relationship between language and the subject. Perceiving the issue of language as an epistemological counterpart of the then intensely debated philosophical issue of subject/object dichotomy in terms of ontology, I will present the most prominent stances of this debate (subjectivist, objectivist, organicist, dialectical). In a case study on Coleridge’s poetry (“Kubla Khan”, “Love”, “Self-Knowledge”) and Biographia Literaria, I will present ideas about authorship inherent in these texts in connection with the stances of the debate on language. Coleridge, who was himself philosophically interested in the problematic of the relationship between language, subjectivity, and the objective, is (mainly because of his reception of Kant) often interpreted as a transcendentalist, posing the Self as an ontologically and epistemologically primary existence, thus corroborating the subjectivist image of Romantic authorship. However, I will argue that his poetry and autobiography reflect problems associated with epistemological subjectivism, as well as objectivism. Thus, concepts of literary authorship (as an interaction of the self and the objective through a text) inherent in his works are multiple and may serve as a problematization of the subjectivist notion of the Romantic author. |
| References |
| Abrams, Meyer H. The Mirror and the Lamp. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism: Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni Press, 2008. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. New York: Routledge, 2005. Clark, Timothy. The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1997. Deakin, Wayne G. Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 Esterhammer, Angela. The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Guignon, On Being Authentic, New York: Routledge, 2004. Kompridis, Nikolas, ed. Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge, 2006. Olney, James, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983. Wheeler, Kathleen M. Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’. London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. |