Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on the Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Negative Cap-abilities: Keats’s Apollonian Afterlives
- The Sublime of Man: Neoplatonic Interactions in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings”
- Liberty and Revolution: Mary Robinson’s Epic Vision in The Progress of Liberty
- Byron’s Don Juan as a Horatian Poem: Citations, Themes and Poetic Ethics
- “Let Me Converse with Spirits”: Haunting Interactions in P. B. Shelley’s Disembodied Dialogues
- Coleridge’s Interaction with Wordsworth: The “Dejection” Dialogue
- The Art of Ellipsis: The Early Keats and B. R. Haydon
- “Negative Capability”: Keats Informing the “Existince” of Shakespeare
- Keats, the Grotesque, and the Victorian Visual Imagination: “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil”
- Keats’s Negative Capability: The Afterlife of the Concept from Romanticism to Roberto Unger and José Saramago
- Romantic Interactions across the Atlantic: F. W. J. Schelling’s Concept of the “Indivisible Remainder” and Herman Melville’s Idea of the “Ungraspable Phantom of Life”
- Interactions between Science and Literature: Ludwik Zejszner’s Anxiety of Literary Influence
- Shelley’s “Subtler Language” and Its Modern Echoes
- Challenging Rousseau, Challenging Conquest: Wales in Maria Edgeworth’s “Angelina; or L’Amie Inconnue” and Helen
- Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Brontë, and Rachel Whiteread
- Textual Intercourses of Women Playwrights with Their Audiences at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- “We love Jane Austen more and more”: William Dean Howells and the Rise of American Janeitism
- Cultural Interaction: The Construct of the “Noble Savage” in the Poetry of Goethe, Seume, and Chamisso
- Margaret Fuller between America and Europe: Dispatches from Britain, France, and Italy as Exercises in Cultural Criticism
- Bettina von Arnim and Her Writings on Poland
Summary
Things cannot to the will Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
(John Keats)the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn.
(Walter Benjamin)Keats's phrase “Negative capability” is by far his best-known literary concept. It is often associated with his feeling for sentient life and his dislike of poetry with didactic designs on the reader—his preference for the fluidity of Shakespearian identity, as opposed to Wordsworth's egotistical sublime. Over time, the concept has proved both fruitful and resistant. Fruitful, for instance, in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, where it designates not just the avoidance of premature closure, but the capacity to bear the anxiety of not knowing. Resistant, because the phrase has proved difficult to recuperate for Hegelian dialectics (“tarrying with the negative”), especially—but not only—in light of Keats's stated mistrust of German idealism.” Rather than striving to reconcile contradictions, Keats opts for openness to what could not yet be thought or put into words: “things … tease us out of thought.” We are left with Keats's own definition of the quality he viewed as central to literary achievement, in his letter of December 1817: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—” (Letters, 1:193).
Taking my cue from Samuel Weber's critical study, Benjamin's -abilities (2008), I want to propose a “wild” a-historical reading, on the analogy of a “wild surmise.” Weber seizes on a recurrent formula in Walter Benjamin's critical lexicon: his use of the suffix -ability (or -ibility); in German, -barkeit. The suffix adds open-endedness to the abstract nouns to which it is attached. Benjamin's list includes determin-ability, recogniz-ability communic-ability, citability, and (above all) translat-ability; not to mention know-ability, read-ability, and “iter-ability” (Jacques Derrida's coinage). The suffix, -ability, suggests possibility or potential.
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- Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives , pp. 25 - 54Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021