This thesis explores how Shelley's poetic reticence characteristically produces hermeneutical and ethical aporias within received ways of thinking. These aporias elicit critiques of the philosophical and social discourses that support them. Shelley's poetry employs narratological ambiguity, omission and above all communicative reserve to make the reader more aware of his or her interpretative responsibility to engage with or resolve these strategic gaps. His reticence also allows his reader to conceptualise an enlarged constitution of the Subject. I develop a phenomenological approach to reading Shelley's major verse inspired by Wolfgang Iser's work on the productive functioning of textual gaps and blanks. I show how Shelley's poems, by destabilising their own processes, produce dynamic intersubjective experience. As in Sartre's phenomenological aesthetics, (upon which Iser's work is based) where the world is productively re-constituted through an act of imagination, Shelley's reticence makes visible the dialectical relations between world and consciousness. To some extent each uses the other to supply its content. But whereas textual self-reflexivity is normally seen as resulting in intellectualised meta-phenomena (such as irony), the self-critique generated by Shelley's reticence paradoxically results in a positive hermeneutic that challenges influential deconstructive readings of Shelley's aporias as figuring moments of philosophical limitation. Reticence, therefore, has a double function in Shelley's work: it marks areas of uncertainty, scepticism and psychological anguish; it also provides ways of choosing to become knowingly seduced by temporary self-representations that satisfy nostalgia for a more essentialist conception of identity or meaning. This doubleness creates a dialectic that is never resolved, and which continually drives the hermeneutic tensions in Shelley's texts and thought. Shelley's reader is left with the possibility of choosing nostalgia in a generous spirit of self-parody; but nevertheless, reticence also keeps such illusions of fixity, however satisfying, feeling illusory.

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The purpose of this thesis is to give a basic understanding of Percy Shelley's introduction to Gothicism and to explore the Gothic elements found within his writings.

Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Berlin--Freie Universität. / Notes bibliogr. Index.

Inaug. Thesis (Universiẗat Freiburg). / Includes bibliographical references.

L’époque romantique marque un tournant décisif dans les relations entre création littéraire et connaissance scientifique. Le discours scientifique se dote progressivement d’un langage et d’une méthode spécifiques, rompant avec la philosophie naturelle, qui conjuguait jusqu’alors considérations physiques et métaphysiques, observation et célébration de la nature. À l’heure où William Wordsworth lance l’aphorisme « we murder to dissect », déclaration d’indépendance de la parole poétique vis-à-vis du discours scientifique, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) étudie avec assiduité les sciences à Eton puis à Oxford, avant d’entreprendre une formation médicale au Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital de Londres. Cette thèse met en évidence la transfiguration poétique des concepts et théories scientifiques dont Shelley avait pris connaissance à travers ses lectures et sa formation, ainsi que le saut imaginatif qui subvertit ces représentations en les intégrant aux réseaux des métaphores que le texte tisse selon ses propres lois. En une métamorphose féconde, Shelley déploie les soubassements mythiques et imaginaires, ainsi que les prolongements éthiques et métaphysiques des écrits scientifiques sur lesquels il se pencha. Cette étude se situe à la rencontre de deux ambitions heuristiques, de deux exigences formelles. Science et poésie sont à la recherche des harmonies cachées qui sous-tendent le monde des apparences. Soumettre l’absolu à la mesure, soumettre la beauté à la métrique poétique, soumettre la complexité infinie du monde naturel au calcul mathématique : telles sont les entreprises parallèles de la poésie de Shelley et de la science de son temps. / The Romantic era was a time of tremendous change in the relationship between literary creation and scientific knowledge. Scientists framed a specific language and distinctive methods as they moved away from natural philosophy, which had thus far combined physics with metaphysics and united the observation of nature with its celebration. While William Wordsworth stated that « we murder to dissect », thus declaring the secession of poetic writing from scientific discourse, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was steadily studying science at Eton and then at Oxford, before embarking on a medical training at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. This thesis explores the poetic transfiguration of the scientific theories and concepts that Shelley came across in his readings and during his studies. It focuses on the way science is subverted by the poet’s imagination, as scientific representations undergo a fruitful metamorphosis, and become pa! rt of the webs of metaphors woven by the text according to its own laws. Shelley recreates the mythical and imaginary foundations as well as the ethical and metaphysical implications which lie dormant in the scientific writings he looks into. This study examines the encounter of two heuristic endeavours, of two highly formalised ways of writing. Science and poetry are in search of the hidden harmonies which underlie appearances. Measuring the measureless, encompassing absolute beauty within poetic metrics, subsuming the infinite richness of the natural world within the rules of mathematical calculation, such are the parallel endeavours of Shelley’s poetry and the science of his age.

On the premise that examination of a poet's language can provide a valid and significant approach to the study of a work of art, this thesis proposes to make such a study of Prometheus Unbound, the major poetical work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with specific attention to his use of color language.

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