| Interweaving
past and present texts, The Challenge of Coleridge engages
the British Romantic poet, critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge
in a "conversation" (in Hans-Georg Gadamer's sense) with philosophical
thinkers today who share his interest in the relationship of interpretation
to ethics and whose ideas can be both illuminated and challenged by
Coleridge's insights into and struggles with this relationship.
In his philosophy, poetry, theology, and personal life, Coleridge
revealed his concern with this issue, as it manifests itself in
the relation between technical and ethical discourse, between fact
and value, between self and other, and in the ethical function of
aesthetic experience and the role of love in interpretation and
ethical action.
Relying on Gadamer's hermeneutics to supply a framework for his
approach, Haney connects Coleridge's ideas with, among others, Emmanuel
Levinas's other-oriented notion of ethical subjectivity, Paul Ricoeur's
view about the other's implication in the self, reinterpretations
of Greek drama by Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, and Gianni
Vattimo's post-Nietzschean hermeneutics.
Coleridge is treated not as a product of Romantic ideology to be
deconstructed from a modern perspective, but as a writer who offers
a "challenge" to our modern tendency to compartmentalize interpretive
issues as a concern for literary theorists and ethical issues as
a concern for philosophers. Looking at the two together, Haney shows
through his reading of Coleridge, can enrich our understanding of
both. |
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| David
P. Haney is Hargis Associate Professor of English Literature
at Auburn University. His previous book is William Wordsworth and
the Hermeneutics of Incarnation (PSUP, 1993). His work has also
appeared in PMLA, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review,
Clio, Style, Southern Humanities Review, Albion, and Criticism. |
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