Reading for the Pause: The Uses of Suspension in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry
Item
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Title
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Reading for the Pause: The Uses of Suspension in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:5c40b874be69:11336
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identifier
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11750
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Creator
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McCarthy, Anne Catherine,
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Contributor
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Nancy Yousef
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Date
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2012
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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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English literature | poetics | poetry | romantic | sublime | suspension | victorian
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Abstract
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Reading for the Pause investigates the relationship among ethics, epistemology, and form in nineteenth-century poetry. Although they represent a number of different genres, the central texts---Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Tennyson's Maud, Robert Browning's "An Epistle...of Karshish," and The Prince's Progress by Christina Rossetti---employ paradigmatic techniques, forms, and images of suspension, unsettling habitual patterns of language and knowledge. The pause of suspension, as distinct from the delays of narrative suspense, both marks the site of epistemological crisis and functions as a potentially powerful response to uncertainty that offers alternatives to skeptical detachment.;The first two chapters establish suspension within Romantic discourses on the sublime. Coleridge defines the sublime as the "Suspension of our Comparing powers." Christabel---a text identified with both the "willing suspension of disbelief" and presumably unwilled conditions of "suspended animation"---dramatizes the impasse of an ambivalent sublime. The "trance sublime and strange" in "Mont Blanc" has often been taken as a figure for passive receptivity, but a broader consideration of Shelley's poetry reveals suspension to be a creatively enabling, embodied posture. The second half of this project traces the development of suspension as a mode of not-knowing in the poetry of the later nineteenth century. Maud mobilizes images of suspended animation and premature burial in order to draw attention to dilemmas of signification caused by a language whose referential status always remains uncertain. The dramatic monologue "Karshish" has generally been read as a straightforward retelling of Christ's miraculous resurrection of Lazarus, yet a reading attentive to forms of suspension reveals a more complicated approach to gospel truth. Readers must suspend their own religious knowledge and enter into Karshish's drama of uncertainty. The concluding chapter uses suspension to reconsider the manifestations of religious faith in the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Far from reflecting a posture of renunciation and withdrawal, Rossetti's poetic practices reflect a deep engagement with what she elsewhere calls the "divergences" that order the human world. What thus begins as the visionary experience of the Romantic sublime emerges in mid-nineteenth-century poetry as "poetic faith": a posture of awareness, receptivity, and engagement poised between knowing and not knowing.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
