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Sensing Meaning: Aesthetics and Vulnerability in the Romantic Age examines the politics of aestheticization by investigating how Romantic era literature aestheticized precarity and vulnerable persons. Romantic aesthetics have been characterized by twentieth century philosophers as apolitcal, elitist, and even as fascist. Similarly, scholars have criticized Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats for a solipsism that favors poetry and art at the expense of the material world. Many of these criticisms share an assumption that the period was primarily––or, perhaps, exclusively––an aesthetic ideology. This project re-conceptualizes aesthetics into the process by which we scrutinize, contest, and eventually alter the value of our values.
My chapters highlight the ways literature and aesthetics participate in more overtly political debates. The opening section discusses the ability to find meaning in the environment and link this cognitive capacity to the Romantic notion of poiesis, or the faculty of fictioning. This faculty is crucial to the Romanticism’s project of refiguring the human subject. In this chapter, I read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark as articulating an ethics predicated on this faculty to forge affective connections to the land, the poor, the non-living, and future generations, culminating in Wollstonecraft’s own prescient thoughts on our current ecological crises. The subsequent chapter, “Working,” claims that the Romantic period comes to aestheticize the ongoingness of labor and the uneven distribution of care along lines of gender and class.
In “Noticing,” I use Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” to discuss sexual assault and the ability to notice or perceive injustice. The chapter calls for an epistemic justice that is built on what the philosopher Debra Bergoffen has called the “Politics of the Vulnerable Body.” To quote Bergoffen, this strives to make “the ‘we’ of humanity... the ‘we’ of vulnerability.” The final chapter, “Feeling,” explores the complications of fragility, race, and the Romantic subject.
Partially at stake in my project is the role literature and the arts has played––and can still play––in the reformation of our values, in how a subject connects to vulnerable others, and in underscoring the importance of the natural and social environment we find ourselves embedded within. As such, my dissertation demonstrates one way the Humanities can speak to today’s conflicts: in critiquing not only how our present can offer new answers to old questions, but also the value of some old answers to our new, pressing political questions.

ETD_9742

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-qdzd-c940

ETD doctoral

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