WALTER PATER: THE POETICS OF CHANGE (BRITAIN).
Item
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Title
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WALTER PATER: THE POETICS OF CHANGE (BRITAIN).
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Identifier
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AAI8319750
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identifier
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8319750
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Creator
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CHOE, WOLHEE.
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Contributor
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Angus Fletcher
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Date
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1983
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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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"Walter Pater: The Poetics of Change" analyzes Pater's prose in its relation to Romantic poetry. This analysis is based on the assumption that Pater's aesthetic and moral discourse is a development of Romantic visions of eternity and self-knowledge. The English Romantic poets' attempts at integrating existential anguish into imaginative self-transcendence provide the material for Pater's aesthetic perception. Pater appropriates what saving values Romantic texts offer by releasing their spirit into a meaning for himself; that is, he reads them for his own theory of aesthetic criticism.;Pater conceives aesthetic perception to be moral; the qualifying "aesthetic" does not define technique or more of seeing only, but characterizes his theory of life in terms of an epistemology which establishes the ground of meaning. In a moment of experience, perception gathers together the past and present into a cohesive whole. Thus in the act of perception, Pater believes, a poem, a person, or a myth acquires a fresh meaning, and through it, the subject evolves into a new self.;The pregnant moment of perception, as presnted by Pater, has three constituents: the momentary statis of beauty (Chapter II), the dynamic act of experience (Chapter III), and the energy generated for aesthetic freedom or morality (Chapter IV). The three divisions of each chapter interweave these three aspects of the moment from different perspectives. Thus Section One of each chapter analyzes a given aesthetic concept synchronically, and Section Two studies diachronically the discerned components of ideas and images in relation to their philosophical and poetic past. Section Three deals with the ideals of beauty (morality) that fuse opposites to create perpetually expanding moral selves.;Pater's fusion of mind and nature in the body is both perceptible to the outward sight and is the "vision within." It is a union of the physical and metaphysical. The past as the experience of now, through the juxta-position of flux and art, bodies forth eternal prototypes.
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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.
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Program
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English
