Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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rucore19991600001
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PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
NjNbRU
Identifier (type = doi)
doi:10.7282/T3TH8KFM
Genre (authority = ExL-Esploro)
ETD doctoral
Abstract
“Lyric Mindedness” recovers conversations between Romantic-era poetics and the science of the embodied mind. While recent scientific approaches have tended to reinforce the idea of “the lyric” in its most familiar Romantic formulation—where it voices a solitary or idealized consciousness—“Lyric Mindedness” shows that Romantic-era lyric theory served as the occasion for a livelier debate between diverse, competing models of mindedness. Romantic theories of the lyric flirt with materialism, entertain the notion that the mind spreads over bodies and linguistic technologies, and explore the individual mind’s entanglements with a social environment made up of other minds. I begin by examining James Macpherson’s “Ossian” poems, in which he takes up the Scottish Enlightenment’s understanding of the lyric as a vestige of human cognition in its earliest and most pristine stages. Because his poems were largely forgeries, however, Macpherson imports eighteenth-century physiology into his Ossianic recreations, and experiments with the relation between poetic form and popular knowledge. The second chapter pursues the reception of that same theory—that poetry expressed the foundations of human cognition—into Romantic texts that align lyrical practice with cognitive disability. I trace the argument from William Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” through Walter Scott’s Waverley, to show how the lyric, like disability, came to be understood as revealing the quasi-mechanical operations to be found at the core of cognition.Chapter three, on the collaborative writing and thinking of William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, examines how technologies of writing and, more specifically, the lyric as a generic medium, bring mental activity out of the individual head and into social circulation. The final chapter turns to William Hazlitt’s counterintuitive philosophy of action, which holds that even the simplest self-directed activities, like pulling away from a hot stove, require the same outward-directed faculties as sympathy for another person. This strange conclusion casts new light on Hazlitt’s later literary criticism, often read as installing a notion of private lyric that we have come to regard as traditionally “Romantic.” His early philosophy, by contrast, gives a glimpse of what a more capacious approach to “lyric mindedness” might look like.
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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