HOLY GHOSTS: ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND ITS FIGURAL PHANTOMS by ANNA CARROLL A ...

204 Pages·2016·0.73 MB·English

HOLY GHOSTS:
ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND ITS FIGURAL PHANTOMS

by

ANNA CARROLL

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Department of English
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

December 2015
DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE

Student: Anna Carroll

Title: Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms

This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by:

Forest Pyle Chairperson
Paul Peppis Core Member
Karen Ford Core Member
Ken Calhoon Institutional Representative

and

Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School

Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.

Degree awarded December 2015

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© 2015 Anna Carroll

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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT

Anna Carroll

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

December 2015

Title: Holy Ghosts: Romantic Asceticism and Its Figural Phantoms

This dissertation reconsiders sacred tropes in the Romantic poetry of William
Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats within the context of ascetic performances
and written saints’ lives. I argue that reading these poets as ascetic figures helps us to
better understand Romantic isolation as a deeply social engagement, for an ascetic rejects
his social milieu in order to call for the sanctification of a corrupt community. Asceticism
redraws the lines of Romantic immanent critique of nineteenth-century England and
newly explains the ghostly afterlives of poets whose literary personae transcend their
biographical lives. Furthermore, this study takes up the ways in which the foundational
ascetic tropes of Romantic poetry bind the major poets together in an impenetrable canon
of writers with holy vows to poetry and to each other. My readings examine different
kinds of ascetic vocation at play in the work of each poet, and I ultimately argue that this
traditional support for the Romantic canon demands that we reconsider our critical
attachments to Romanticism as the beginning of a secular literary tradition.

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CURRICULUM VITAE

NAME OF AUTHOR: Anna Carroll

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:

University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL

DEGREES AWARDED:

Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2015, University of Oregon
Master of Arts, English, 2010, University of West Florida
Bachelor of Arts, English, 2007, University of West Florida

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:

Poetry and Poetics
British Romantic Poetry
Literary Theory
Magical Realism

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of English, University of Oregon, 2010-
2015

Graduate Research Assistant, Department of English, University of West Florida,
2008-2010

GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS:

Sherwood Travel Award, “Phantom Poetics: Accounting for Anxiety and Absence
in the ‘Lucy’ Poems,” University of Oregon, 2012

Bursary Award, 2011 Wordsworth Summer Conference, Wordsworth Trust

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my esteemed advisor and dissertation chair, Forest Pyle, for his
encouragement and support of my work. I’m so fortunate to have the guidance of such an
exceptional scholar and generous person. I would also like to thank Professor Paul Peppis,
Professor Karen Ford, and Professor Kenneth Calhoon for agreeing to serve on my
dissertation committee. Having a group of people whom I so deeply respect as teachers
and scholars has raised the standard of my writing and thinking.
I’m eternally grateful for my advisors at the University of West Florida, David
Baulch, Robin Blyn, and Gregory Tomso. You taught me to think critically, and this
dissertation and degree would not have come to pass without your confidence in me.
I am also thankful to the many wonderful friends who have gone with me through
this graduate program. There are so many people who have contributed to my well being,
but I would like to thank specifically those of you who have read and listened to my
writing, and helped me clarify this project, especially Francesca Gentile, Diana Martinez,
Hannah Godwin, Sarah Ray Rondot, Bethany Jacobs, Mary Ganster, Bill Fogarty, Rose
DeBell, Margaret Bostrom, and Kaila Rose. Thank you for your love, patience, and
brilliance.
Finally, thank you to my family. You’re everything to me, and wanting to do
justice to your faith in me has seen me through this process. Thank you to my
incomparable parents, Tom and Betsy Carroll, who always love me, no matter how whiny
I get. And thank you to my grandparents, Jane and Jim Clowe. To my Pappy, who went
to be at peace just before this project was finished, thank you for believing in me and
trusting me to make good on my word.
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To my Granny, who lately reminded me that poetry is the language of the soul.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page

I. INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND THE SURVIVAL OF
SACRED TEXTS ........................................................................................................ 1

II. HOLY HINTERLANDS: WORDSWORTH’S RURAL SACRED GROUND AS
CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN .................................................................................. 23

III. SHELLEY’S SYMPATHETIC APOSTASY: ALASTOR AND ASCETIC
WANDERING ............................................................................................................. 72

IV. KEATS’S “MONKISH CELL”: MONASTIC REBELLION AND THE
PERSONAL SACRED ................................................................................................ 123

V. CODA: THOMAS HARDY AND THE GHOSTLY AFTERLIFE OF
ROMANTIC ASCETICISM ....................................................................................... 172

REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 188

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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC ASCETICISM AND THE
SURVIVAL OF SACRED TEXTS
In a 2014 episode of the podcast Radiolab, the show’s host, Jad Abumrad,
interviews Eugene Thacker, the author of In the Dust of This Planet, a 2011 book on
nihilism. Abumrad and Thacker discuss the curious pop culture after-life of the book.
Though the text itself enjoys no great commercial success,1 the cover image is
appropriated and painted by a Norwegian artist, whose art is picked up by a high-end
fashion label. This label then outfits the titanic American rapper-producer Jay-Z for a
video featuring his widely consumed music and his just-as-widely consumed celebrity
persona. As such, In the Dust of This Planet becomes visible in one of the most
recognizable cultural projects of our time. Thacker is utterly bemused by the accidental
ubiquity of his work, but the episode is dedicated to finding out whether the appearance
of this trace of nihilist philosophy in the work of one of the most famous pop artists in the
world is pure coincidence, or an unconscious manifestation of the spirit of the age. By
way of making this inquiry, the episode describes the context in which Jay-Z carries this
nihilist message: a fake movie trailer for his On the Run worldwide tour with Beyonce.
The trailer pitches the Bonnie-and-Clyde tale of Jay-Z and Beyonce as they flee from the
criminal city (presumably Vegas) to the Nevada desert. Having escaped all the seedy
characters who try to entangle them in a web of corruption, the couple makes it to the

1 The actual text of In the Dust of This Planet is, however, source material for the writers
of the True Detective character, pessimist Louisiana detective Rust Cohle. Abumrad
brings up the influence of nihilist philosophy on the HBO phenomenon to point to a
superlative surge in nihilist tendencies at our contemporary moment of pop culture.

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desert, and thus to the scene in which Jay-Z sports In the Dust of This Planet on the back
of his motorcycle jacket as he points a gun toward the sky. Radiolab asks two related
questions of this odd moment in mainstream art: why is Thacker’s book appearing in this
moment of contemporary history? And why does this happen in the desert?
The correspondents for this episode of Radiolab question why nihilism should be
at the heart of this generation’s aesthetic expressions, and they trace similar surges in
nihilist sensibility through history, explaining that these outbursts all follow violent
upheavals in geopolitics. After the confusion and disgust that follow WWI, Dadaism is
born; after the threat of mutually assured destruction during the Cold War, punk emerges.
For the episode’s contributors, the present moment of pop culture is responding to the
ambient threat of global terrorism, ecological disaster, and deadly epidemics. Yet, when
Abumrad interviews Simon Critchley, a philosopher who teaches, among other subjects,
early Christian mysticism at The New School for Social Research, Critchley explains that
nihilism’s utter repudiation of corrupt society is only one part of a process that has much
deeper roots in early ascetic practice. At times of crisis, culture turns to the desert, the
symbolic province of ascetics. Asceticism is an aesthetic first responder to the emergency
state of a socio-political system that is moving toward its own self-destruction. When
Jay-Z escapes to the desert, then, he participates in a long aesthetic tradition of carrying
art into the wilderness, where the artist can be cleansed, his art sanctified, and his textual
offering made worthy of dissemination among the masses, who are in desperate need of
an alternative to dying culture. Jay-Z takes the ambient nihilism of contemporary culture
into the wild, and this act symbolizes his rejection of a pessimistic approach to the state
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