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Jeffrey is doing a good job trying to avoid the fate embodied in a joke I made up while writing a Master's Thesis on (gasp!) Ted Hughes in 1976: Q. What's the difference between a dissertation and a scholarly book? A. A dissertation is guaranteed five readers. If anyone is really interested, by the way in my dissertation, "'Energetic Exertion': Reading and the Romantic Long Poem, Blake's Jerusalem and Browning's Sordello". . . . just joking. About being interested, that is. That really is the title. Which brings me to defamiliarization. I think Browning ('Makers-see') is more important for this aesthetic than Wordsworth--and I'd chuck in the Germans too. But the notion is pan-Romantic and you can't argue that Wordsworth "invented" it. Here's Coleridge, for instance: "Ideas may become as vivid and distinct, and the feelings accompanying them as vivid, as original impressions. And this may finally make a man independent of his Senses. One use of poetry." One could argue as well that the effect of the sublime in that tradition (Kant, Burke, et alia) is to defamiliarize. A passage from the Critique of Judgement is sure to send us all back to sweet poesie: "Therefore the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we attribute to an Object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the Object in place of one for the idea of humanity, in our own self--the subject); and this feeling renders, as it were, inuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility." My cognitive faculties are being rendered inuitable -- time for more coffee, David Latané David Latané |