[Review] Cian Duffy (2014) My purpose was humbler, but also higher: Thomas De Quincey’s 'System of the heavens’, popular science and the sublime

Review of article: Duffy Cian, Romanticism, Volume 20 Issue 1, Page 1-14, ISSN 1354-991x Available Online Mar 201

Reading Redaction: Symptomatic Metadata, Erasure Poetry, and Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata”. The article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the modalities through which supposedly blank surfaces are, in fact, textured depths that can be read

From Relics to Remains: Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” and the Emergence of Secular History

In their recurrent focus on the relationship between narrative and experience, “testimony” and “relics,” the Lyrical Ballads show Wordsworth to be our first truly archaeological poet, the first to take seriously the notion of “pre-history” as a mode of encountering the material world in the present, and not just a way of designating a material world that pre-dates written records. Wordsworth’s reading in Druid history, and specifically William Stukeley’s accounts of barrow excavations near Stonhenge and Avebury, helped to shape the poet’s understanding of “pre-history” in this sense. “The Thorn”, with its reiterations of measurement and spatial orientation relative to the site of a mound that may or may not be “an infant’s grave,” reflects the specific influence of Stukeley’s accounts, as well as Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the mystery of how whatever “remains” in the present manages to make present, in the space and time of a universal history, the historian or poetic “pre-historian” who has encountered it

'"Intermitting Power": De Quincey's Sublime Identifications'

In an ambivalent reception, Thomas De Quincey’s writings identify with and parody Kant’s sublime in the 'Critique of Judgment' (1790). In his essays on the 'aesthetics' of murder, De Quincey mocks Kant’s rational sublime as itself murderous, but he also embraces that sublime as a phantasm of power. The essay argues that by embodying Kantian sublimity in a series of 'intermitting' identifications, De Quincey dramatises the sublime as a theatre of conflict. In this situation, De Quincey himself is empowered and disempowered, and made a subject of elevation and abjection; this means that his work throws into sharp relief the discordant politics of the sublime. Via Kant, De Quincey identifies with both potency and privation, the twin poles of the sublime, with the result that in the fields of philosophy, murder, autobiography, nationality, politics and modernity his writings enact and anatomise the ideological dissonances of sublime power. The essay shows how De Quincey exposes and dramatizes the conflicts of sublime power in his 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (1821, 1856), 'Suspiria de Profundis' (1845), his essays on murder (1827, 1839, 1854), his commentaries on Kant, and his accounts of the ‘literature of power.’ In his writings on the antithetical effects of opium, we find a self variously empowered and disempowered, elevated and prostrated – both an imperial and a ‘pariah’ subject. De Quincey’s texts, in this sense, show how the sublime heights of Kantian idealism are collapsed by the compulsive return of what they try to repress - in De Quincey’s case, violence, murder, nightmare, dependency, materiality, the body, modernity, the Oriental ‘other.