Alternative Subject Positions and Subject-Object Relations in Keats's Poetry

2022-12
Günday , Merve
This dissertation claims that Keats’s poetry is a reaction against the discourse of modernity which traumatized the human subject by creating a divide between human and nature, subject and object. It argues that by transcending this divide and acknowledging the agency of both subject and object, his poetry makes an ideological statement and offers a new site of existence or relationality to the readers. This site also implies a response to the accusations that the Romantics were not interested in the realities of their time. What Keats does is to give an aestheticized response to the hardcore facts of his time. Departing from previous studies due to its emphasis on subjectivity and relationality, this dissertation discusses Keats with regard to post-non/anthropocentric, alternative subject positions and subject-object relations in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” “In drear nighted December,” “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil,” “Lamia,” “La Belle Dame sans Mercy,” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Drawing on Lacanian and Braidottian epistemologies, the dissertation discusses the intricacy between the imaginary and the symbolic, the irruption of the psychotic into the symbolic, and the agency of the object on subject in Keats’s poetry against the background of concepts like sinthome, desire, extimacy, psychosis, objet petit a, Borromean knot, and Becoming and in the light of these concepts suggests that the inner dynamics of both the subject and the object acquire agency, which shatters Oneness and totality assumed in the Cartesian self.

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Citation Formats
M. Günday, “Alternative Subject Positions and Subject-Object Relations in Keats’s Poetry,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2022.