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Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language / Jerome Christensen.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2019]Copyright date: ©1981Description: 1 online resource (286 p.)Content type:
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ISBN:
  • 9781501741630
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Observations on Hartley -- 2. Hartley’s Influence on Coleridge -- 3. The Marginal Method of the Biographia Literaria -- 4. The Literary Life of a Man of Letters -- 5. The Method of The Friend -- Index
Summary: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's prose has long confounded its critics. In Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen offers a reading of the prose which captures its pious, perverse vitality and characterizes its rhetorical form.Coleridge sought "to expose the folly and legerdemain of those who have. abused the blessed machine of language." Christensen develops a framework for reading Coleridge's language by first exploring Coleridge's critique of David Hartley's philosophy of associationism. Although Coleridge discredited Hartley's system, he failed to devise a coherent alternative. Lacking a firm grounding for his philosophical method, Coleridge wrought a mobile, fragmentary discourse which, Christensen asserts, is important to the Romantic tradition not because it is central, but because it is brilliantly eccentric.Christensen navigates the complexities of Coleridge's language in prefaces, guides, marginalia, notebooks, letters, essays, and manuals, but chiefly in the Biographia Literaria and The Friend, his major works in prose. The Biographia, he argues, is best conceived of as marginal discourse—a category that subsumes not only Coleridge's criticism of association but also the mix of deference and dominance in his engagement with Wordsworth's genius. In The Friend, Coleridge appears as the figure of the Friend, mediator between the extremes of principle and prudence. These extremes do meet in Coleridge's prose, but the moral force of the encounter is vitiated by Coleridge's purely rhetorical resolution in the figure of chiasmus. The chiasmus, Christensen concludes, is the trope that both shapes The Friend and propels the blessed machine of Coleridge's language.
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Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781501741630

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Observations on Hartley -- 2. Hartley’s Influence on Coleridge -- 3. The Marginal Method of the Biographia Literaria -- 4. The Literary Life of a Man of Letters -- 5. The Method of The Friend -- Index

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http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's prose has long confounded its critics. In Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen offers a reading of the prose which captures its pious, perverse vitality and characterizes its rhetorical form.Coleridge sought "to expose the folly and legerdemain of those who have. abused the blessed machine of language." Christensen develops a framework for reading Coleridge's language by first exploring Coleridge's critique of David Hartley's philosophy of associationism. Although Coleridge discredited Hartley's system, he failed to devise a coherent alternative. Lacking a firm grounding for his philosophical method, Coleridge wrought a mobile, fragmentary discourse which, Christensen asserts, is important to the Romantic tradition not because it is central, but because it is brilliantly eccentric.Christensen navigates the complexities of Coleridge's language in prefaces, guides, marginalia, notebooks, letters, essays, and manuals, but chiefly in the Biographia Literaria and The Friend, his major works in prose. The Biographia, he argues, is best conceived of as marginal discourse—a category that subsumes not only Coleridge's criticism of association but also the mix of deference and dominance in his engagement with Wordsworth's genius. In The Friend, Coleridge appears as the figure of the Friend, mediator between the extremes of principle and prudence. These extremes do meet in Coleridge's prose, but the moral force of the encounter is vitiated by Coleridge's purely rhetorical resolution in the figure of chiasmus. The chiasmus, Christensen concludes, is the trope that both shapes The Friend and propels the blessed machine of Coleridge's language.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)