Abstract
dc:description.abstractMy thesis proposes a new encounter with Byron’s poetry, one which I have tentatively called ‘evental’. I take events to mean, following Heidegger, not points on an already established timeline, but rather occurrences unfolding the dimensionality of time in its horizons of past, present, and future. This approach is particularly suited to Byron’s tendency to poeticise the event in terms of its aftermath, in the thusness of the present which stands opposed to Manfred’s key insight of ‘having been otherwise’. Such an inquiry into the poetic structure of events poses an alternative to the historicist presupposition of an event as a nexus of possibilities; as I read it, Byron’s poetry exhibits an awareness of and challenge to the metaphysical foundation of a movement from potentiality to actuality, or the relationship between essence and existence. Each of my chapters attends to a moment which suspends the regular, or regulated, flow of time. Byron’s insomnia has been well-documented, but Chapter One charts his troubled relationship with sleep from a poetic perspective. Not reproducing the Romantic interest in the oneiric imagination, Byron rather idealises dreamless sleep as an atemporal space. Recurring dreams and nightmares, however, disrupt that narrative both personally and poetically; in response, Byron takes up the habit of nocturnal composition to exhaust his imagination. At the same time, he begins to believe the inner dynamism of sleep to be at work in composition, too, conceiving of poetry as ‘somnambulism’. Chapter Two works out the dynamics of experiencing the present as a moment of stasis. Manfred and Cain are both locked in a time of aftermath, though of a different make in each case. Proceeding from Manfred’s judgment that ‘actions are our epochs’, the chapter reads ‘event’ in its etymological meaning of ‘outcome’, one which Byron himself favoured, and ‘epoch’ both as a point and a period which follows an action, to argue that even in this retrospective insight, the dramatic poems hold the event to remain inconceivable and therefore unsayable. Chapter Three turns to the historical dimension of Byron’s works. I argue that for Byron, history occurs essentially as event, and inquire specifically into what happens when Byron announces the historical moment with a ‘perchance’. The aim is to show how the historical event emerges as an effect produced by an adherence to the Aristotelian unities in the plays and an episodic treatment in the narrative poems. ‘Perchance’, then, as an archaic marker of the past (in contrast to the future-orientated ‘perhaps’), points not merely to the contingency of historical events but allies itself to an ‘alas’, engendering a tragic historical consciousness. Chapter Four maps the vatic dimension of Byron’s poetic interventions, reading his ‘prophecies’ not as attempts to predict but to enact the future. Veterotestamentarian precedent is related to contemporary political events to produce writing for another time and other generations, while also posing a form of resistance literature in the present. This ethical impetus of Byron’s poetic self- conception, his Promethean sympathy, is related to his notion that ‘words are things’: poetry holds the power to be effectual, to form an event as much as an intervention in the course of events. The thesis concludes that Byron’s evental poetics ultimately result in a particular notion of poetic freedom, which I situate outside of a metaphysics of potentiality. The Conclusion probes, lastly, Byron’s utopian thinking in relation to the efficacy of literature, and the tensions that remain in such speculative efforts.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Gotthardt, Marc-André
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Wilson, Ross
Subjects
dc:subject × 11Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112907
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/375104