This book explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later major prose in relation to more recent theories of the sublime. Building on the author’s previous monograph Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum, this study focuses on sublime theory and discourse in Coleridge’s other major prose texts of the 1820s: Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829). This book thus ponders the constellations of aesthetics, literature, religion, and politics in the sublime theory and practice of this central Romantic author and three of his important successors: Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Rancière.
Author(s): Murray J. Evans
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 231
City: London
Acknowledgments
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Touchstones for Sublimity: Coleridge’s Lay Sermons (1816–17) and the 1818 Lectures on Literature
Political Prognostication and Remedies in the Lay Sermons
Symbol in Transit in the Lectures on Literature (1818)
Chapter 3: Sublime Boundaries of Belief and Unbelief: Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824) and Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe (2006)
Moving Readers’ Boundaries in Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit
Christianity, Psychoanalysis, and the Sublime in Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe
Kristeva’s “Amorous Discourse” and Coleridge’s Symbol
Chapter 4: Sublime Disintegration: Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) and Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970)
Arranging Aphorisms in Aids to Reflection
Common Sense Versus Reason
Unity of Tone: The Crux on Redemption, Idea, and Indifference
Adorno’s Genealogy of the Sublime in Aesthetic Theory: Towards Modern Art
Modern Art in Adorno’s Genealogy: Semblance and Sublime, Theology and Truth Content
Symbol in Adorno and Coleridge
Sublime Discourse in Coleridge and Adorno
Coleridge’s Sublime Discourse
Chapter 5: Sublime Politics: Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis (2011)
Sublime Discourse in Coleridge’s Church and State
Illustrations and the Genealogy of the “Nationalty”
Rancière’s Aisthesis and His Genealogy of the Sublime
Spiritual, Material, and Religious in Aisthesis
Sublime Discourse and Symbol: Rancière on James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Sublime in Coleridge, Kristeva, Adorno, and Rancière
Politics and the Sublime
Religion and the Sublime
Philosophy and the Sublime
Conclusion
Index
