EXCESS AND INSUFFICIENCY: ONTOLOGY IN THE ROMANTIC AND MODERN LYRIC (LITERARY THEORY, HEIDEGGER, ARISTOTLE)

The dominant analytic models of contemporary research on Post-Enlightenment lyric depend heavily upon two separate conceptual structures, one derived from historical disciplines, the other from a philosophical and psychological understanding of subjectivity. The division of academic disciplines has allowed these two areas of inquiry to be treated separately: their historical and philosophical foundations have thus been insufficiently understood, and the connection between them has been altogether neglected.;A survey is conducted of the most influential literature both on Romanticism and on lyric, which focuses on the complicity between the attempt to isolate Romanticism as an historical phenomenon and the model of subjectivity that is attributed to the Romantics to serve this historical purpose. It attempts to show that this double aim of the critical literature implicates most contemporary work in a set of epistemological concerns more relevant to the eighteenth century than to Romanticism. It also has the historical purpose of demonstrating that the principal crisis of contemporary literary theory is itself intimately linked to the development of early nineteenth century thought.;The issue of ontology is then developed to show that the inadequacy of the conceptual models analysed earlier can neither be confined historically to the nineteenth century nor limited to the discipline of literary studies. Ontology is shown to be incommensurable with the kind of knowledge associated with historical science and with the notion of subjectivity it entails in the nineteenth century.;The final chapter treats the shift in historiography from the late Enlightenment to the Romantic period. It discusses several of the French encyclopaedists and their English counterparts, and Leopold Von Ranke, but it is predominantly concerned with Kant. Its purpose is to show that the very movement most conspicuously committed to science carries within it the same inherent crisis found in contemporary literary theory and in ancient metaphysics, and thus indicates its own surpassing. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).;This work was divided into three sections, following two prefatory parts, the first of which elaborated the two basic areas of theoretical difficulty, and the second of which gave examples, from the different disciplines of philosophy, history, and literary inquiry, of the manner in which those theoretical difficulties were implicated with one another.