Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language

Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language

Author: Jerome Christensen

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1501741632

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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.


Coleridge's Philosophy

Coleridge's Philosophy

Author: Mary Anne Perkins

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13:

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Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a `logosophic' system which attempted `to reduce all knowledges into harmony', paying particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished.


The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Author: Frederick Burwick

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-02-23

Total Pages: 1473

ISBN-13: 0191651095

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A practical and comprehensive reference work, the Oxford Handbook provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on all aspects of Coleridge's diverse writings. Thirty-seven chapters, bringing together the wisdome of experts from across the world, present an authoritative, in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a major author of British Romanticism. The book is divided into sections on Biography, Prose Works, Poetic Works, Sources and Influences, and Reception. The Coleridge scholar today has ready access to a range of materials previously available only in library archives on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bollingen edition, of the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forty years in production was completed in 2002. The Coleridge Notebooks (1957-2002) were also produced during this same period, five volumes of text with an additional five companion volumes of notes. The Clarendon Press of Oxford published the letters in six volumes (1956-1971). To take full advantage of the convenient access and new insight provided by these volumes, the Oxford Handbook examines the entire range and complexity of Coleridge's career. It analyzes the many aspects of Coleridge's literary, critical, philosophical, and theological pursuits, and it furnishes both students and advanced scholars with the proper tools for assimilating and illuminating Coleridge's rich and varied accomplishments, as well as offering an authoritative guide to the most up-to-date thinking about his achievements.


Coleridge, Language and the Sublime

Coleridge, Language and the Sublime

Author: C. Stokes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2010-11-03

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0230295061

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Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force.


Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy

Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy

Author: Peter Cheyne

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0198851804

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'PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas' as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge's thought to be 'the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers'. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, B�hme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls 'the spiritual platonic old England', distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge's poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the 'Limbo' sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge's theories of imagination and the 'Ideas of Reason' in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.