Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language

Jerome Christensen

Published by Cornell University Press 1981

Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language

Jerome Christensen

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501741630

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Jerome Christensen is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	1
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	7
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
1. Observations on Hartley Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2. Hartley’s Influence on Coleridge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
3. The Marginal Method of the Biographia Literaria Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
4. The Literary Life of a Man of Letters Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	118
5. The Method of The Friend Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 286
Keywords: Musical Arts & Ethnomusicology; Biography & Autobiography; Art History

eBook

Published: June 30, 2019
ISBN: 9781501741630