RECONCEPTUALIZING SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATIONS IN SHELLEY'S POETRY ON A FLAT ONTOLOGY

Date

2025-7

Author

Tülüce, Mustafa Uğur

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This dissertation claims that the external phenomena in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems are translocated beyond the limited perceptive and imaginative powers of the poet. Thus, I argue that discussing Shelley’s poetry on a flat ontology without assigning the prior agency to the imagination of the poet or the light coming from within only but also acknowledging the agentic power of the material object on equal scale leads to a new hermeneutical frame within which his poetry can be explored. This frame marks a departure from the majority of Shelley readings which have put the emphasis on the imaginative (creative/agentive) power/energy of the poet. By treating humans, objects, poet, poem, beholder/reader and external reality on an equal footing, this study offers a new object-subject relationality rather than a subject/object divide in Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” “To a Skylark,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Ozymandias,” “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in Florentine Gallery” and “The Sensitive Plant.” In order to foreground and explore the relationality between non-human and human as well as the reality of objects outside their relations, this study draws on Timothy Morton and Graham Harman’s object-oriented epistemology and the concepts of hyperobjects, interobjectivity, an object-oriented understanding of metaphor and symbiotic real. This hermeneutical attempt suggests a novel discussion of Shelley’s poetry from the flip side of the coin, and aims to balance the former one sided discussions which put the emphasis on the imaginative power of the poet.

Subject Keywords

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, object oriented ontology, Romantic poetry

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115409

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis