John Donne: The subject of casuistry

John Donne: The Subject of Casuistry considers the history of casuistical discourse as a discourse of healing through dialogue; as a discourse that inevitably questioned traditional notions of subjectivity by way of its ongoing interrogation of the concept of conscience; and as a discourse that defined an epistemology and an ethics based on relations of knowledge. Claiming that casuistical discourse and psychoanalytic discourse are historically continuous, this thesis examines the points of contact between the two and finds them in notions of divisions in the human subject, in elaborations of the transference as both an enabling relationship and an epistemological process, and in the crucial role of narrative itself in both discourses. The writings of John Donne encompass self-declared works of casuistry, works of a more mixed genre, and poetic works usually considered outside the purview of casuistry. Occupying a pivotal time and place in the history of both casuistical discourse and novelistic discourse, Donne's writing provides a unique opportunity for reading both the influence of casuistical discourse, and a seventeenth-century ground for Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic discourses on human subjectivity. Drawing on the writings of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva this thesis extends the boundaries of casuistical discourse to include poetry and considers the ethical components of psychoanalytical discourse as they have evolved from the confessional manuals to Freud's "The Question of Lay Analysis." Donne's Biathanatos and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle are paired as comparable elaborations of the death instinct. Both Freud's Mourning and Melancholia and Kristeva's writings on melancholia, abjection, and the maternal are read with Donne's "Anniversary" poems for an analysis of these elegies as Donne's own articulation of abjection and poetic sublimation; In "La Corona", and a selection of Holy Sonnets, including "What if this present" and "Show me deare Christ", Donne manipulates the subjective positions of writer and reader, de-stabilizing both the visual image constructed in meditation and its corollary in the specular ego. Donne critiques the social construction of gender in his Songs and Sonnets by way of an extended interrogation of the assumptions and conventions of Petrarchan love poetry. Questioning the nature of the self in its relations of knowledge spanning the sexual, social, political, and spiritual spheres, Donne radically rereads conscience as that share of knowledge gained through acts of willing self-sacrifice.