Reading William Blake and T.S. Eliot: contrary poets, progressive vision

Many critics resort to explaining readers' experiences of poems like William Blake's Jerusalem and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in terms of "spirituality" or "religion". These experiences are broadly defined in this thesis as jouissance (after Roland Barthes' essay The Pleasure of the Text) or "experience qua experience". Critical attempts at the reduction of jouissance into abstract constructs serve merely as stopgap measures by which critics might avoid having to account for the limits of their own rational discourse. These poems, in particular, are deliberately structured to preserve the reader's experience of the poem from reduction to any particular meta-discursive construct, including "the spiritual". Through a broad application of Rezeption-Asthetik principles, this thesis demonstrates how the poems are structured to direct readers' faculties to engage with the hypothetical realm within which jouissance occurs, beyond the rationally abstractable. T.S. Eliot's poetic oeuvre appears to chart his growing confidence in non-rational, pre-critical faculties. Through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, Eliot's poetry becomes gradually less prescriptive of the terms to which the experience of his poetry might be reduced. In Four Quartets he finally entrusts readers with a great deal of responsibility for "co-creating" the poem's significance. Like T.S . Eliot, although more consistently throughout his oeuvre, William Blake is similarly concerned with the validation of the reader's subjective interpretative/creative faculties. Blake's Jerusalem is carefully structured on various intertwined levels to rouse and exercise in the reader what the poet calls the "All Glorious Imagination" (Keynes 1972: 679). The jouissance of Jerusalem or Four Quartets is located in the reader's efforts to co-create the significance of the poems. It is only during a direct engagement with this process, rather than in subsequent attempts to abstract it, that the "experience qua experience" may be understood

Reading William Blake and T.S. Eliot: contrary poets, progressive vision

Many critics resort to explaining readers' experiences of poems like William Blake's Jerusalem and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in terms of "spirituality" or "religion". These experiences are broadly defined in this thesis as jouissance (after Roland Barthes' essay The Pleasure of the Text) or "experience qua experience". Critical attempts at the reduction of jouissance into abstract constructs serve merely as stopgap measures by which critics might avoid having to account for the limits of their own rational discourse. These poems, in particular, are deliberately structured to preserve the reader's experience of the poem from reduction to any particular meta-discursive construct, including "the spiritual". Through a broad application of Rezeption-Asthetik principles, this thesis demonstrates how the poems are structured to direct readers' faculties to engage with the hypothetical realm within which jouissance occurs, beyond the rationally abstractable. T.S. Eliot's poetic oeuvre appears to chart his growing confidence in non-rational, pre-critical faculties. Through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, Eliot's poetry becomes gradually less prescriptive of the terms to which the experience of his poetry might be reduced. In Four Quartets he finally entrusts readers with a great deal of responsibility for "co-creating" the poem's significance. Like T.S . Eliot, although more consistently throughout his oeuvre, William Blake is similarly concerned with the validation of the reader's subjective interpretative/creative faculties. Blake's Jerusalem is carefully structured on various intertwined levels to rouse and exercise in the reader what the poet calls the "All Glorious Imagination" (Keynes 1972: 679). The jouissance of Jerusalem or Four Quartets is located in the reader's efforts to co-create the significance of the poems. It is only during a direct engagement with this process, rather than in subsequent attempts to abstract it, that the "experience qua experience" may be understood

Literature in the Event in South Africa and the United States

x, 208 p.In this dissertation "literariness" is defined not merely as a quality of form by which texts are evaluated as literary, but as an immanent and critical sensibility by which reading, writing, speaking, learning, and teaching subjects within the literary humanities engage language in its immediate aesthetic (and thus also historical and ethical) aspect. This reorientation seeks to address the literary academy's overwhelming archival focus, which risks eliding literary endeavor as an embodied undertaking that inevitably reflects the historical contingency of its enactment. Literary endeavor in higher education is thus understood as a performance by which subjects enact not only the effect of literary texts upon themselves but also the contingencies of their socio-economic, national, cultural, and personal contexts. Subjects' responses to literature are seen as implicit identity claims that, inevitably constituted of biases, can be evaluated through the lens of post-positivist realism in terms of their ethical and pragmatic usefulness. Framing this reoriented literariness in terms of its enactment in higher education literature classrooms, this dissertation addresses its pedagogical, methodological, and personal implications. The events of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the literature arising from it serve as a pivotal case study. The TRC Hearings, publically broadcast and pervasive in the national discourse of the time, enacted a scenario in which South Africans confronted the implications for personal and national identities of apartheid's racial abuses. The dissertation demonstrates through close reading and anecdotal evidence how J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull formally reactivate this scenario in the subject in the event of reading, while surveys of critical responses to these texts show how readers often resisted the texts' destabilizing effects. A critical account of the process that resulted in Telling, Eugene - a stage production in which U.S. military veterans tell their stories to their civilian communities - analyzes the idea of literariness in the U.S. and assesses its potential for socially engaged literary praxis.Committee in charge: Linda Kintz, Chairperson; Suzanne Clark, Member; Michael Hames-Garcia, Member; John Schmor, Outside Membe