Abstract
This essay examines well-known passages from John Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion (FH) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph of Life (TL), and parallel poetic or allegorical arguments offered by both poems.1 These arguments concern the possibility of the ultimate destruction of both the sublime and literature, at least of the project of literature as it has been conceived in Western intellectual history. It is possible, following Maurice Blanchot, to take a different view and ask whether we are still capable of literature under these conditions.
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Notes
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, tr.Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
Arkady Plotnitsky, “All Shapes of Light: The Quantum Mechanical Shelley,” in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Stuart Curran and Betty Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 263–73.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984)
John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1958)
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
Paul de Man,” in Material Events, ed. Barbara Cohen,Thomas Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49–89;
Marcel Proust, “The Guermantes Way,” The Remembrance of Things Past, tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1981)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984)
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Crticism (London: Methuen, 1983)
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
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© 2004 Timothy Morton
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Plotnitsky, A. (2004). Beyond The Inconsumable: The Catastrophic Sublime And The Destruction Of Literature In Keats’s The Fall Of Hyperion And Shelley’s The Triumph Of Life. In: Morton, T. (eds) Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981394_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981394_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-29304-8
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