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

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

Univ., Diss.--Cambridge. / Includes bibliographical references.

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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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is often seen to exhibit a linear intellectual development. He moves, allegedly, from a thoroughgoing materialism in his early years to embrace, with varying levels of enthusiasm, a diametrically opposed idealism. Yet, if we are attentive to even an early, supposedly naïvely ‘materialist’ work like Alastor (1816), we discover a much more complex reality. Here, Shelley’s materialism concerns not only the sonorous and physiological elements of existence, but also the gaps, vacancies, silences and interstices of thought. These too, after all, comprise part of our lived experience, and deserve to be designated material. But materialism has struggled, by definition, to explain the real but not-manifest phenomena of human experience. Shelley’s poetry actuates diverse kinds of intermittence and disjunction, and engages with philosophical contexts not previously associated with the poet. He did not seek to resolve the relation between the material and immaterial world of the soul (a quite impossible task anyway), but enact the dynamic between sensuous reality and the gaps and pauses that punctuate it. We see this not only through the incidents that his verse describes; importantly, Shelley also enacts this through performance: through the way in which we recite his poetry into existence, through the pauses and ‘fainting periods’ that our own voice describes. The need to take into account this vocal, performative element of Shelley’s verse belies the notion that he was ever a simple, unreconstructed idealist. Where the recent turn toward materialism has hitherto been somewhat narrowly conceived as a return to objects, things and their thing-ness, Shelley’s sensuousness permits us to ask further: to ask into the nature of the relations between objects, and the ways in which they come into being. His ‘intermitted song’, a poetry of radical pauses, is not only a resonant example of how prosody intersects with, and achieves, philosophically significant thinking, it is also a stinging critique of any account of life or matter that is offered solely in terms of motion, fullness, functionality, and continuity. His achievement is not only of relevance to the Romantic Period and the history of philosophy, or an answer to vital materialism, Shelley’s poetry and prose offer a remarkable reassessment of the notion of a continuing life.

Inaug.-diss.--Jena. / Lebensabriss. "Einleitung" (p. [1]-6) includes bibliography.

Inaug.-diss.--Giessen. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 103-104.

Inaug.-dies.--Greifswald. / Lebenslauf. At head of title: Englische philologie. "Bibliographie": p. 39-40.