Refiguring the Fall: Shame and intertextuality in Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Keats.
Item
-
Title
-
Refiguring the Fall: Shame and intertextuality in Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Keats.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3187807
-
identifier
-
3187807
-
Creator
-
Hatch, James C.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Joshua Wilner
-
Date
-
2006
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English | Literature, Modern
-
Abstract
-
Refiguring the Fall examines four Romantic works in which shame is of central importance: Wordsworth's "Nutting" and the first book of The Excursion; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus; and Keats's The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. The particular parts of these works covered are ones with intertextual connections to book 9 of Paradise Lost (and in the case of Keats, to Dante's Purgatorio); they are also instances of learning or instruction. Given Romanticism's importance in the formation of psychoanalysis, these moments of shame would usually be described in terms of guilt. Guilt, however, which has a structure of exchange that includes the possibilities of debt and reparation, is a highly developed and social emotion. In psychoanalytic terms it depends on anxiety and the fear of punishment. But underneath and previous to guilt is an affect more primitive than the typically Romantic emotions whose structures are those of exchange (guilt), giving (joy), or collapse (dejection). This is the affect of shame, as described by the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911--1991) in his Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (4 vols., 1962--1992). Tomkins sees shame as an innate affect that moderates other affects. It springs from the interruption of the interocular circuit between mother and child and is a reaction not to what is "wrong" or the source of possible punishment and anxiety, but to what is "strange," the fact of interruption itself. Tomkins's formulation of shame can describe an intertextuality that involves violation and shame independent of any Oedipal cause for guilt. Because each affect must be moderated by shame for it to have shape and contour---for it to become "other"---and for it thus to make itself present in relation to another affect, shame can be seen as helping temporality become real in consciousness and in narrative. In this way, shame as Tomkins enunciates it is the affective corollary to allegory.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
