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Dissertation Information for Son-Moo Ryu

NAME:
- Son-Moo Ryu

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- English

SCHOOL:
- Indiana University (USA) (2005)

ADVISORS:
- Nicholas Williams

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Ivan Kreilkamp
- Deirdre Lynch
- Janet Sorensen

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: Imagining society: William Blake, William Wordsworth, and George Eliot

Abstract: This dissertation examines Romanticism's internal relation to the "modern" project by focusing on the moments in which William Blake, William Wordsworth, and George Eliot participate in the construction of a public space which would secure human rights and provide possibilities for freedom. In opposition to Hannah Arendt's critique of modern civil society as destroying any meaningful political action, these Romantic writers utilize modern sociality as a space in which a new politics of inclusion and new potential for collective action can be developed.

Qualifying the misguided but dominant image of the Romantic poet as the isolated consciousness of liberal individualism, this study excavates in Romanticism a deeply social understanding of individual identity that actively participates in the dynamic social sphere and opens it to new uses and practices. While the three writers whom I examine are not in agreement on the forms of sociality/community they place in opposition to reified modern society, each articulates individual identity as fundamentally intertwined with social restraints and tries to imagine a form of public life ( ethos ) that embraces openness, vulnerability, or dislocation by pointing to the constitutive outside.

In Chapter One, I situate Wordsworth against the current liberal-communitarian debate and claim that the dual descriptions of Wordsworth as the proponent of "isolated consciousness" and "the poet of community" make sense only read against the uniquely modern form of sociality. For Wordsworth, a mere authority of community and tradition cannot suppress the claims of individuals, whose identity this community crucially constitutes. Chapter Two challenges the hermeneutic experience of Wordsworthian cultural tradition (a peaceful succession of institutionalized moral frameworks) and supplements it with the Blakean critique of ideology (a critique of power that shapes the rules of legitimation and the determination of the contexts in which those rules obtain). Chapter Three traces the transformation of the Romantic discourse in the Victorian period by positioning Eliot as a syncretic thinker who synthesizes the romantic and the liberal. In the Conclusion, I analyze the political implication of Romantic communities in the postmodern era especially of their persistent resistance to the reified tendency that validates the existent form of liberal democracy as the culmination of history.

MPACT Scores for Son-Moo Ryu

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calculated 2010-10-14 14:13:34

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