Negative capabilities: Keatsian thresholds from "King Lear" to "Vampyr".
Item
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Title
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Negative capabilities: Keatsian thresholds from "King Lear" to "Vampyr".
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Identifier
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AAI3169947
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identifier
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3169947
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Creator
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Leal, Amy.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Morris Dickstein
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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When the twenty-two year old John Keats wrote a letter to his brothers in December 1817, little did he know that he was formulating a poetic axiom that critics would consistently misread for nearly two centuries. Most critics have followed Walter Jackson Bate in defining Negative Capability as the negation of the self and the opposite of an "egotistical sublime," but Keats himself defined it as the ability to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." At no point in the letter does Keats define Negative Capability as opposed to an "egotistical sublime." It is true that in a later epistle, Keats defines a "chameleon Poet" such as himself or Shakespeare as having "no self," but while a chameleon Poet undoubtedly has Negative Capability, Negative Capability does not, in Keats' definition, mean the ability to negate oneself. Rather, it is a state of suspension between certainty and ignorance, doubt and assurance, in which the artist can make "a wild surmise" with an engaged imagination.;My dissertation, "Negative Capabilities," uses biographical and interdisciplinary readings to restore his intended meaning of Negative Capability as a threshold state of half-knowledge and "wild surmise." This work draws on periodicals, medical treatises, and art exhibitions from the Regency era as well as Keats's own writing and reading from 1817 to recapture his state of mind at the time he composed his Negative Capability letter and draw a phenomenology of mind. Reading Negative Capability this way elucidates an alternate Keatsian lineage than the usual tracing of influence, one that includes not only Shakespeare and Coleridge, but also Emily Bronte, Sheridan LeFanu, Henry James, and Carl Dreyer. It reveals connections between texts that are often overlooked and locates within them spaces of "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" that leave us, as Keats would say, "in a Luxury of twilight."
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
