The presence of the text: Sterne, satire, sublime.
Item
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Title
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The presence of the text: Sterne, satire, sublime.
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Identifier
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AAI9924805
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identifier
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9924805
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Creator
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Fanning, Christopher John.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Angus Fletcher
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Date
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1999
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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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This dissertation takes on the problematic coexistence of satire and the sublime during the eighteenth century, using Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as a paradigmatic case. The essential problem I explore here is how satire, which levels its subjects to the common denominator of the bodily and the physical, and the sublime, which elevates and transcends by means of a "pure" and "disinterested" aestheticism, both come to be the most influential discourses of the period. I propose that during the eighteenth century both satire and the sublime are primarily rhetorical modes which, in the age of flourishing print culture, derive their power from the printed text. Thus Sterne's well-known attention to the minutiae of the text as an aesthetic object, which questions our assumptions about communication at its very material roots, is accompanied by invocations of both satire and the sublime. The two are united in their concern with representation in language which is itself represented by physical marks on the printed page. By bringing together historical and theoretical approaches, combining Jacques Derrida's grammatology, Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of the dialogic and carnivalesque and varieties of critical approaches to the body with aspects of cultural history such as the history of the book, I am able to relate postmodern concerns to the larger shifts in cultural epistemology brought about by print.;The dissertation explores these issues first by examining Sterne's rhetorical development in his sermons. Next, I trace the rise of "the presence of the text" in the development of Classical and Renaissance Menippean satire, concluding with the performative works of the Scriblerians and Sterne. These works manifest a self-reflexive preoccupation with the physical or nonverbal aspects of the text, which I also detect in the rhetorical sublime of Longinus. Despite its aims at transcendence, this sublime cannot escape the physicality of textual expression. Thus both satire and the sublime embrace the physical properties of language, which, given the flourishing print culture of the eighteenth century, are manifested in the physical presentation of the text, such as that in the first editions of Sterne's works, where "the presence of the text" is central to his effect.
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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.
