Coleridge's Chrysopoetics: Alchemy, Authorship, and Imagination.
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This thesis is an attempt to assess the creative potential of alchemy as a master trope in
Coleridge's conception of authorship and imagination. It begins with a challenge to the idea that an
autonomous author is at the centre of a literary work. This idea is crucial to the reception of
literature and to the way in which concepts of "originality" and "authorship" are typically
understood. Against this marking out of an author as a singular, autonomous, and uniquely
privileged "self', I posit that, for Coleridge, authorship occurs in a transformative or alchemical
interspace between the desire for self-expression and the necessarily other-determined nature of
creativity. Offering an alternative trajectory for the author, Coleridge elaborates an imaginative
strategy in which the dislocation of the selffrom itself is the truest path to self-expression, and the
author must become other in order to become morefully himself. Demonstrating a unique link
between plagiarism and creativity, this thesis suggests that alchemy, better than any other system,
accounts for Coleridge's propensity for plagiarism and for an aesthetic of artifice.
In an attempt to trace Coleridge's familiarity with Hermetic and alchemical discourses
throughout his life, it has been necessary to review works as varied as those of Plato, Marsilio
Ficino, Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme, Herman Boerhaave, and F. W. J. Schelling. I then suggest
how Coleridge appropriates alchemical terminology to his own aesthetic and imaginative ends.
Unable to resolve the desire for aesthetic autonomy with the impossibility of asserting the self in
one's own voice, the thesis posits that Coleridge "plays" in the hermeneutic interspace between
selfhood and otherness, creativity and counterfeit, authority and artifice, in order to arrive at an
entirely unique strategy of alchemical self-exposition. Arriving at authorial selfhood through the
odyssey of alterity, Coleridge's "play"giarisms, in this view, do not violate the principles of
originality, but redefine them. The thesis ends with a consideration of the necessarily negotiated
fiction of all acts of imagination and authorship.
Authors
Toor, KiranCollections
- Theses [3822]