Abstract

Sublime experience robs criticism of its object. The sublime is ineffable, indeterminate, unavailable to cognition. This is the case for performance as for literary criticism. Yet, for Lyotard, the sublime presents possibilities for aesthetic criticism to discuss ethics, which is of increasing importance to postmodern critical theory across disciplines, including performance studies, rhetorical theory and communication. ;This dissertation examines the sublime as an aesthetic category in Lyotard's philosophy, and presents the ironies, in language and in form, which develop from sublime experience as it leads toward ethical pronouncements in Wordsworth's The Prelude . Research was undertaken for three reasons: firstly, to redirect deconstructionist critical insights toward a more productive understanding of the purpose of rhetoric; secondly, to offer a new critical perspective on a text in which the sublime figures as the superordinate experience; and, thirdly, to seek an understanding of sublime experience from the perspective of the performance of literature. ;Chapter One surveys three strands of aesthetic criticism that figure in the body of the dissertation: deconstructionist criticism of Romanticism and Wordsworth, which has recently sought an ethical axis to present to its detractors; performance-related criticism, both past and present, that has privileged the ethical value of performing literature; and, the contemporary philosophy of Lyotard, overtly ethical in content. Chapter Two details Lyotard's writing in aesthetics, concentrating on his deployment of the sublime. Chapter Three focuses on the ironies that envelop Wordsworth's design and execution of The Prelude. Chapter Four reconfigures Wordsworth's representation of sublime experience as another figural gesture of irony, particularly in two representations of sublime experience in Book I. Wordsworth's encounter with the Solitary Traveller in Book IV is the principal focus of Chapter Five; the chapter argues that Wordsworth's ethical undertaking is another failure, suggesting that Wordsworth's representations of sublime experience parallel his failures elsewhere in the work. ;Chapter Six concludes that within Wordsworth's ironic failure resides also an ethical success, but one for which criticism depends on Lyotard's recasting of the aesthetic sublime. Sublime experience is then forwarded as analogous to the ethical approach to Otherness effected by interpreters of literary and non-literary texts