The undertow of reason: Re-defining the sublime through the Middle Passage.
Item
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Title
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The undertow of reason: Re-defining the sublime through the Middle Passage.
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Identifier
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AAI3296999
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identifier
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3296999
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Creator
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Powers, Nicholas.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Barbara Webb
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Date
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2007
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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, American | History, Black
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Abstract
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The sublime is a pivotal concept in Western literature. First defined by the ancient critic Longinus, it has been a touchstone of theorists for centuries. It is returned to again and again because at its core is an acceptance of the need and reality of transport beyond the self toward a larger reality. Artists-philosophers of early modernity used the sublime to give the emergent West a substitute for the religious sense of rapture that could not fit within its new secular ethos.;Slave-narrators like Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano used the sublime to give meaning to their forced transport of the Middle Passage. My thesis seeks to answer the question of how does a slave redefine the sublime? My dissertation answers urgent questions in the field of literary criticism; first among them being in post-modernity how does one define transcendence? If grand-narratives have collapsed and there is nothing beyond the text to reach for, what is left us? The European sublime is based on an anthropology that isolates the human within language. In contrast the slave sublime begins with, as Du Bois said, "two warring ideals in one dark body" that tear open to reveal the body electric.;Secondly, my thesis continues the excavation of survival strategies of survivors of the slave trade. In particular, how they resurrected a self in a colonial language and found freedom within the sublime. It has the added bonus of employing an overlooked trope of cannibalism in the early Black Atlantic texts. It offers a method of reading where language is seen as food for the self in the body.;Methodology. The theoretical grid I use is Hegelian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. The major concepts that underwrite my dissertation are Lacanian ones. The first is the Other, the locus in the symbolic order in which the subject is constituted. It guarantees the meaning of speech and the relations mediated by it. The Other is a position of faith, of an imagined pureness. The next is desire the stage in which the subject comes into being. It begins when infantile need is articulated through words, that worded demand takes on a double function of providing for needs but also a proof of love. Words will forever arc over need and call for the Other's presence, as a proof of love that can never be satisfied. Desire is born and drives a subject to endless quest to be what the Other wants. The last major concept of my thesis is Oral Sadism. It was defined by Freud as one of the early stages of psycho-sexual development in which the proto-subject seeks to incorporate the Other by destroying it and introjecting it. The Black Atlantic slave narrators display an aggressive morality that destroys white supremacist ideology while introjecting it into their psyches. The spiral of aggression and identification continues through out Diaspora culture in general and literature in particular. In this vortex is the slave sublime.
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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.
