Ghostly language and liminal experience: William Blake, Romantic discourse on the sublime, and American punk sound
Item
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Title
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Ghostly language and liminal experience: William Blake, Romantic discourse on the sublime, and American punk sound
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ab9c09ce3592:11568
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identifier
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12055
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Creator
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Tayson, Richard,
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Contributor
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Alan Vardy
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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 | American studies | Aesthetics | Music | Edmund Burke | Kant | Patti Smith | Punk Rock | Sublime Aesthetic | William Blake
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Abstract
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Two modes of inquiry compel and gird this study. The first addresses the aesthetic and philosophical question of the Romantics' experimentation with sound and musical valuation. I observe a move away from a privileging of Lockean sight, and the fixed non-negotiable reality that it implies, in favor of a Romantic emphasis on sound, with its ability to incorporate the ineffable and the unknowable. The second line of inquiry concerns William Blake's influence on New York underground culture, first on Allen Ginsberg, and then on punk performer Patti Smith. Via his deployment of an obscure sublime soundscape coupled with dissenting politics, Blake has had an enormous effect, through Ginsberg, on the sonic experimentations of Smith.;If a post-Enlightenment move occurred toward a poetics based on sonic possibilities, what Kevin Barry refers to as the "empty sign," I theorize that it began in 1757, the year of both Blake's birth and the first publication of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. With its six sections on sound, Burke's text is poised at the tipping point of visual delimitation giving way to mysterious audition, and as such may be noted as possibly the earliest marker of the Romantic era. Thus, the aesthetic of the sublime as developed in Burke's Enquiry registers a shift from Lockean empiricism to Romantic irrationality rendered in sound. This shift may be noted in Blake's An Island in the Moon, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Tiriel, and The Four Zoas, which, when observed in the context of phonetic and discursive embodiments of sound, demonstrate an ever more potent sublime soundscape.;I include Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement to further investigate the sonic modulations found in Blake, Ginsberg, and Smith. Subjective universality and the mathematical and dynamical sublime are of notable import in my investigation of the affective component of a listener's aesthetic engagement with voicings, echoes, harmonics, cacophony, and dissonance that allow for interrogation of inchoate, mysterious modes of being not readily accessed by denotative linguistic signs, but discovered in the empty signs of sublime sound.
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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
