Dissertation

Dead or Alive : Poetry and the Expansion of Sensibility

Verge, Patrick

2022

Overview

My PhD looks at the relation between literature and moral life. Does great writing enrich me in some distinctive way? Is it the means to a better life or a clearer mind or some more enigmatic kind of spiritual adventure? Are its peculiar forms of intelligent vitality boosts to a wider vision of human possibility? These are the questions of the first chapter, \"Martha Nussbaum and Moral Attention.\" What is the relationship between writing and the truth? Was Plato right to banish the poets for their lack of truth? Or is to banish the poets to banish the world? In the second chapter, \"On Poetic Truth,\" I look at these questions in the context of discussions of metaphor and myth; comedy; banality and flattery, and the idea of poetry as a form of self-expansion. The third chapter, \"Stanley Cavell and the Evasion of Genius,\" looks at the concept of genius in relation to moral life. Cavell recharacterizes genius as a voice within me leading me beyond myself, out of the stasis of conformity, into a gamble with life. Genius here is seen as a dimension of the human as such, an attribute of each of us—rather than as the name for a certain class of exceptional human beings. I think of genius, along these lines, as the human transfiguration of the forces of nature: it is the name for the instinct in me which presses me to attain a new freshness of life and to live up to nature's standards of vitality and beauty, which I glimpse in privileged moments. To neglect or evade one's genius, as Nietzsche pretty much puts it, is to cease to exist: it is vegetation to the point of rottenness. Cavell also says that poetry and philosophy are internal to the pursuit of genius— they are my modes of self-creation. I become myself through the forms of being that they make possible. But what tensions exist between morality and this pursuit of genius? What do you have to endanger in order to come to life in this world? These are the questions of the third chapter. In each of these chapters, I pick one philosopher whose work gives my writing something like the shape of argument, or acts as a runway from which I launch into my own thoughts: in the first, Martha Nussbaum; in the second, Bernard Williams; Stanley Cavell in the third. Even at its most entertaining, its most fun, great writing speaks to me like the call to a vocation. My whole being is at stake: I live or die in language. Because of this the word \"literature\" often seems naff to me, as if already too domesticated, too compartmentalised. I prefer to say writing or poetry: the first I love because it evokes the labour of creation, the act of writing itself, in which my imagining mind become intimate with my whole body; the second I love because to my ears it speaks of a deep affection for language, one that connects us almost to the beginning of the world, the primordial songs that the first humans sang as expanded into a life of richer consciousness. I am a human—a speaking, thinking, playing, feeling thing. Poetry is my expansion in all these directions. My aim is to speak of this sense of its importance.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Morality / Writing