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theses

For scholars of romanticism, “nature” has taken many forms: a site of imaginative renewal, a tool of conservative ideology, a distraction from historical trauma. Yet these apparently disparate accounts all focus more on the perceiving mind than on the natural world that it perceives or misperceives. It turns out to be hard to think about nature in itself. Romanticism After Nature” expands our sense of this key romantic concept by recovering a history of speculation about nature apart from human consciousness. In identifying a romantic-era concern with the world that exists independently of the individual mind, this dissertation finds varied, and sometimes conflicting, paradigms for thinking past the dialectics of mind and nature long held to define romanticism. This is also a story about the romantic survival of an early enlightenment view of the natural world, most memorably articulated by Baruch Spinoza’s “ethics” of substance. Beginning with the destruction of traditional ordering schemas like the Great Chain of Being, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the end of nature in its pre-modern sense and the discovery of an infinite material universe. This radical material vision, at odds with all triumphal narratives of human progress, returns in romantic literature and philosophy, refracted through a range of competing idealist commitments. Though it eventually gives way to an instrumentalism about nature still in force today, romanticism itself comprises a moment of rare engagement with a world that is not inherently for us. The dissertation draws on a variety of discourses, from the history of science and philosophy to contemporary ecological criticism and continental thought. Nonetheless, it pivots on the literary as a speculative enterprise that enables us to contend with the threats of catastrophe and extinction.

ETD_5805

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Greg Ellermann

doi:10.7282/T39G5K87

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.