News

Book cover

Digital Event: 16 March 2024 - Murray Evans on Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory

The Friends of Coleridge present:

Saturday 16 March, 6pm (UK)

Murray Evans on Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory

 

https://liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/95050286332?pwd=TEpxNDNQRkV1eXBqTVg5eVBvZ0JZQT09

Meeting ID: 950 5028 6332

Passcode: !8fSntS#

About the talk:

Join us for this online event with Murray Evans delving into the world of Coleridge’s sublime later prose in dialogue with recent literary theory.

Abstract:

Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose and Recent Theory: Kristeva, Adorno, Rancière (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later major prose in relation to recent theories of the sublime. Departing from Coleridge’s Lay Sermons (1816-17) and two lectures on the Middle Ages (1818), this monograph pairs his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (wr. 1824) with Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe (2006), on sublimity, Christianity, and psychoanalysis. It explores Aids to Reflection (1825) with Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970), on the sublime, the demise of symbolism, and theology. Finally it pairs On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) with Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis (2013), on sublimity and sociopolitical change. Dialogue between Coleridge and these modern theorists opens new avenues for understanding each author better, as well as for appreciating the abiding importance of the sublime for modernity.

My presentation will focus on the example of sublime discourse in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (AR) and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. One of Coleridge’s problems in writing AR is to find a language and a structure for his planned anthology of Archbishop Robert Leighton’s aphorisms and his own comments. This problem also involves a tension between the sublime, what he also calls “the Vast,” and its antithesis—“a mass of little things.” In this connection, in AR he cannot imitate the “silvery-grey” tone of Leighton’s writing: a unity of tone evoking his readers’ felt understanding and faith. Instead, a departure from his earlier view and practice of symbolism in the Statesman’s Manual, and his emerging sublime rhetoric, prevent him from cultivating a symbolic sense of intuitive wholeness. His rhetoric must now provide, through figures other than symbol, successive and contradictory glimpses of his all-important Ideas. One such idea is the doctrine of redemption. Reading AR together with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, moreover, also has its advantages. One of these is the pertinence for Coleridge of Adorno’s genealogy of the sublime, from Kant and the Romantics through to modern art when the “sublime ultimately reverses into its opposite”: the fate of a fallen theology in modern art. In particular, Adorno’s thoroughgoing rejection of symbolism, “the unity of the universal and the particular,” illuminates the beginning of this process in Coleridge’s more gradual departure from symbolism. Nevertheless, Coleridge’s distinctive combination of the sublime with Christian theology does not disappear in the “blackness” of Adorno’s modern art. Adorno’s dialectical theory of sublimation asserts that past historical versions of the sublime are not only altered but also retained, “sedimented” in the present of modern art. In this way, Adorno’s sublime discourse is one possible version of what Coleridge’s sublime and theology might become in our times. Finally, reading Coleridge’s sublime depiction of the Gothic cathedral in his 1818 lectures, when one’s “whole being expands into the infinite,” is also pertinent for Adorno. The Coleridge passage illuminates Adorno’s elusive idea of truth content in art, discovered by participants’ “shudder”—a dispersive shattering of the empirical self in order to reach the objectivity of the artwork.

About the speaker:

Dr. Murray Evans is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Winnipeg and Retired Fellow at St John’s College, University of Manitoba, Canada. He was a Bye Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge, and is an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto (Piano Performance). His past teaching includes courses in medieval literature and medievalism, Coleridge, children’s literature, “Inklings” C.S. Lewis et al., literary history, and literary theory. He is the author of Rereading Middle English Romance: Manuscript Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure (McGill-Queen’s, 1995) and Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum (Palgrave, 2012) and has also published essays on Malory and the Malory manuscript, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, Coleridge, and C.S. Lewis.

About the organizers:

The Friends of Coleridge, founded in 1986 by David Miall and Rosemary Cawthray, exists to foster interest in the life and works of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his circle. We pursue our aims by publishing the journal The Coleridge Bulletin, edited by Jeffrey Barbeau; by hosting a biennial Summer Conference, directed by Tim Fulford and Joanna Taylor; and by running events and workshops for members of the society, for schools and other institutes of education, and for the general public. Membership is open to all. For details of how to subscribe please visit https://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Join. We also welcome any enquiries. Please visit our Contacts page https://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Contactsor for queries about digital events, email to Tom Duggett at tjed@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Dove Cottage April 2021

Coleridge Conference 2024, 29 July-2 Aug, Grasmere

Coleridge Conference 2024, 29 July-2 Aug, Grasmere

The 2024 Coleridge Conference will take place at Dove Cottage/The Jerwood Centre, Grasmere, 29 July-2 August 2024. This will be the first time in its history that the Coleridge Conference has taken place in the Lakes, where Coleridge wrote ‘Dejection’ and The Friend.

The conference will follow the BARS Conference in Glasgow and precede the Wordsworth Summer Conference in Rydal. The keynote speaker is Nigel Leask, Regius Professor at the University of Glasgow and author of The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought and Stepping Westward.

To enquire about attendance, please contact Tim Fulford by email on fulfat62 at gmail.com or Jo Taylor at joanna.taylor at manchester.ac.uk 

Numbers will be limited by the capacity of the Jerwood Centre, so we advise booking your place early. For this Coleridge Conference, delegates will find their own place of residence — though we will lunch and dine together each day. In Grasmere there are many hotels, BnBs, AirBnBs and a youth hostel with both shareable and single-occupancy rooms (no dorms). There is also a campsite. We won’t be rating accommodation or liaising between delegates and accommodation, except to say that the nearest hotel to the venue is the Daffodil and that tripadvisor reviews are very helpful.

Tim Fulford

Jo Taylor

Greg Leadbetter

00 Talk Intelligible Ode flyer image 5

Talk: Friends of Coleridge present Graham Davidson on Wordsworth and Coleridge

The Friends of Coleridge present:

Graham Davidson on Wordsworth and Coleridge and the "Intelligible Ode"


In this book talk, Graham Davidson reexamines one of Wordsworth’s most controversial poems in the context of Cambridge Platonism.


Date and time: Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 3.00-4.30 PM (UK)

Location: ZOOM

Reserve FREE Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/graham-davidson-on-wordsworth-and-coleridge-and-the-intelligible-ode-tickets-701685890387?aff=oddtdtcreator


About your tickets:

Details of how to access the Zoom meeting will be printed on your e-tickets. Reminders and a Zoom link will be sent to your registered email address shortly before the event.


About the talk:

Graham Davidson will be giving a book talk on his new study published in March 2023, The Intelligible Ode: Intimations of Paradise.


From the Publisher's website (https://www.lutterworth.com/product/intelligible-ode-the-intimations-of-paradise/):


From its first publication, what is now known as the Immortality Ode has been praised for the magnificence of its verse and disparaged for its paucity of meaning – the ‘immortality’ of the subtitle unsubstantiated, and the ‘recollections’ insubstantial. Yet Wordsworth’s idea of immortality has clear precedents in the seventeenth century, and recollections of childhood are Traherne’s starting point for the recovery of a lost vision comparable to Wordsworth’s. Via the power of the imagination, or reason, they believed they could experience a renewed vision that both termed variously Paradise, or infinity, or immortality.


Graham Davidson traces the origins of Wordsworth’s poetic impetus to his resistance to the Cartesian division between mind and nature, first adumbrated by the Cambridge Platonists. If reunited, Paradise was regained, but this personal trajectory was tempered by a deep sympathy for the woes of mortal life. Davidson explores the consequent dialogue through some of Wordsworth’s best-known poems, at the heart of which is the Ode. In the last section, he demonstrates how Wordsworth’s publishing history led the Victorians and modernists to misinterpret his work; if one considers Eliot’s Four Quartets as odes, facing several of the same problems as did Wordsworth, there is some irony in Eliot’s dismissal of the Immortality Ode as ‘verbiage’.


About the speaker:

Graham Davidson was the editor of The Coleridge Bulletin for twenty-five years, to which he contributed regularly. He has also published in The Charles Lamb Bulletin, The Wordsworth Circle, Romanticism, and The Philological Quarterly. He has made contributions to Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion, Coleridge in the West Country, The Bible in English Literature and Revisioning Cambridge Platonism. His first book, Coleridge’s Career, was published in 1990.

Rime portrait for Web 1

Two Coleridge-related events

There are two forthcoming Coleridge-related events, both of which occur at Alfoxton House, the former home of the Wordsworths.

The first is a staged recital of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', where it was first recited 225 years ago, (Alfoxton House), this coming 26th August. Further details are available here: https://www.alfoxtonpark.org.uk/workshops-courses-events/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner

The other is a poetry retreat in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge, between 11th and 17th of September. Further details here: https://www.alfoxtonpark.org.uk/retreats-events/seeing-into-the-life-of-things

Seeing for Print

Image 1.jpg

Recitals of 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

An exhibition of paintings inspired by Coleirdge – particularly the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ – has been open in Highgate for the past couple of months, and is likely to be closing soon.

The exhibition has been lent some of Coleridge’s letters for display – beautifully presented. One in particular concerns his drug supply, and the day in 1824 when he stood on the corner of Townsend’s Yard (London N6) and watched as Lord Byron’s cortege passed by on its way to Hucknall in Nottinghamshire.

The exhibition organisers (Andrea Diaz Enciso – a respected Mexican poet/novelist, and Patricio Bosich – a Chilean artist, both resident in London) have arranged for recitals of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ on Sunday January 15 in the gallery at 3 Highgate Hill, London N6. One is due to be given at 4,00 pm, and the other at 7.00 pm.

For further details, visit: https://www.threehighgate.com/