DIALECTIC AND NEGATIVITY: READINGS IN THE RHETORIC OF ROMANTICISM

The dissertation addresses dialectic as an issue for literary interpretation, and specifically for the study of romanticism, through close readings of three texts: Wordsworth's Prelude, Holderlin's "Brod und Wein," and Schiller's Naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. I begin by reviewing recent French work on the problem of reading Hegel's texts and their structure of dialectical Aufhebung, as well as a recent critical convention of considering literary romanticism to be "dialectical." Through this review I develop an understanding of the "negative dialectic" which obtains between dialectical Aufhebung and attempts to read it; I distinguish this from T. W. Adorno's use of the phrase, associate it with problems of rhetoric and allegory, and suggest that romanticism may display such a "negative dialectic" in its texts and their interpretations.;In an extended interpretation of Holderlin's "Brod und Wein," I begin by considering the lacuna which the poem presents in Heidegger's commentaries on Holderlin, as well as the recent convention of understanding the poem as "dialectical." In my analysis I focus upon the structures and operations of rhetorical figures such as prolepsis, metalepsis, catachresis and chiasmus in order to uncover the collaboration of narrator and reader in the construction of a figural narrative of history which at once reflects and occludes the structural role of rhetorical appearances in its "dialectical" writing of history as well as in its critical understanding. Finally, in my reading of Schiller's Naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, I present Peter Szondi's dialectical interpretation of the text as representative of the misunderstanding which obtains between the attempts of a rhetorical theory to be narrated as a history, and the critical attempt to understand theory and history in a dialectical relationship. These two chapters thus interpret the "dialectic" of their texts' histories--a recurrent feature of German romantic Hellenism--as an allegory of rhetorical writing and misreading. In an epilogue I suggest that romanticism names the allegorical relation of critical reading to literary texts, and as such defines a problem of literary criticism and theory as well as one of literary history.;Interpreting the theft scenes in Book I of Wordsworth's Prelude, I introduce the structural importance of theft as an element in the constitution of a sense of self through autobiography, and associate this with Wordsworth's theory of metaphor. I then examine the sequence of figural appearances and personification of nature in the language of the theft scenes, leading to a loss of representationality and understanding for the persona, narrator, and reader. Turning to the Blind Beggar passage of Book VII, I interpret its structure of the allegorical reading of an autobiographical text as emblematic of the problem of reading Wordsworth's autobiography, as exemplified for its personae, author, and critic in the passage itself. In my discussion of the Dream of the Arab of Book V, I begin with a consideration of Geoffrey Hartman's understanding of the rhetorical structure of The Prelude, and then read the passage as a case-instance in the interpretation of rhetorical figures which must necessarily misread them in order for the poem's narrative to continue. In these two chapters a "dialectic" of autobiography and of Wordsworth's interrelation of nature and imagination is deconstructed into a problem of allegory and its reading.