Outside the Habitable Zone: The Poetry and Politics of Life in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems 公开
Mastrogiovanni, Armando (Spring 2019)
Abstract
This dissertation examines the relation between politics, poetics, and the question of life in William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems. I argue that these poems reveal the poet to be a sophisticated thinker of biopolitics. He undertakes a poetic investigation into the link between life and the political, particularly as it bears on sovereignty and the state conceptualized as primordial technologies for sheltering otherwise vulnerable living beings. Its development may be tracked through the process of revisions leading from Salisbury Plain (1793-1794) to Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795-1799), and Guilt and Sorrow (1842). The result of his investigation into the articulation of life and the political is a poetics of life that thinks life not in terms of its systematic form (organic or otherwise), or in terms of an essential power underlying that form, but rather in terms of life’s impossibility. In the Salisbury Plain poems Wordsworth develops a poetics of impossible life. In this study I examine its consequences for Wordsworth’s literary employment of (1) the languages, discourses, and figures of life; (2) the philosophical concept of life thus implied; and (3) the difference that this conjuncture, between concept and figure, between life and the impossible, makes for the fundamental political questions in the literary elaboration of which the poetics of impossible life is inscribed.
Each chapter examines a modality of life which is stripped bare by Wordsworth’s “impossibilizing” muse. The Introductory chapter lays out the program. Chapter Two examines Wordsworth’s use of Rousseau, Lucretius, and Hobbes, as his sources in the preface to Salisbury Plain, which serves as an articulation in miniature of his poetic reduction. Chapter Three examines the teleological structure of the world as the external condition of the possibility of life, and shows how Wordsworth conceives of sacrifice not only as the mechanism that produces political sovereignty, but as the mechanism that produces the teleological structure of the world itself. Chapter Four turns to Adventures on Salisbury Plain, and within it the figure of the female vagrant, to examine the reduction in terms of life’s value and the economies that unfold in and without its condition of possibility.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Life Outside the Habitable Zone
1. Impossible, 1
2. The Trouble with Life: The Question of Plurality, 32
3. Overview of Chapters, 37
One. “Unhouzed Life:” Autobiography and Biopolitics on the Plain, 52
1. Reflections I: History, Temporality, and the Poet’s Living Body, 53
2. Reflections II: The Reduction, 80
3. Unhouzing Nature, 105
Two. Double Exposure: Reducing Life and Producing Death
from Salisbury Plain to Adventures on Salisbury Plain
1. “The Horror of the Horizontal,” 126
2. Fables of Sacrifice, Sacrificial Fables, 152
3. Automaton, Teleology, Repetition, 168
4. “The Price of Being,” 191
Three. Re-Signing Being: The Problem of Value and the Formulation
of a Critique of life at the Border of Salisbury Plain
1. An Aporia in a Dream, 206
2. The Glowworm’s “Uneffectual Fire:”
“The road extended o’er a heath,” 219
3. The Glowworm, the Stone, and the Sovereign:
The Beggar of The Borderers, 231
4. The Poem as Death-Persuader: “Argument for Suicide”
as Critique of The Ideology of Life, 244
5. Black-Body Radiation: Sacrifice and the Prosopopoeia of Life
in Salisbury Plain and The Prelude of 1805, 285
Bibliography, 296
About this Dissertation
| School | |
|---|---|
| Department | |
| Degree | |
| Submission | |
| Language |
|
| Research Field | |
| 关键词 | |
| Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor |
Primary PDF
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Outside the Habitable Zone: The Poetry and Politics of Life in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain Poems () | 2019-04-19 21:02:39 -0400 |
|
Supplemental Files
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|