ブックタイトルRILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

概要

RILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

The Catastrophic Global Order in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Marinertion takes its form in instrumental rationality, whichreifies and objectifies the world, compounding into acrisis in modernity. As Thomas Pfau perceptivelyremarks of the poem,“the true catastrophe of Modernitylies in its unconditionally espousing a means/endmodel of rationality as the sole way of being in theworld”(980). The crisis in the imperial global order isconcurrent with the larger catastrophe of modernity,just as the mariner’s journey of exploration and thekilling of the albatross are connected with an inexorablehistorical logic. The mariner inhabits the bravenew world of modernity and disenchantment, in whichmotive or intention is depicted as absent. The“senselessness”or meaninglessness of the killing signifiesthe necessary demise of the bond between humanbeings and nature; nature appears as a purely instrumentalthing to be explored and violated. Theexpedition itself is a symptom of this malaise ofmodernity, and the violence perpetrated on nature is amanifestation of the rationalist ideology latent in thesea voyage. The poem leaves one with the sense thatmodernity itself is a state of catastrophe, and that themariner’s continued guilt and penance is the price onemust pay for modernity.Modern Language Notes 122 (2007): 949-1004.Warren, Robert Penn. Selected Essays. New York: Vintage,1966.Wordsworth, William. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth.Ed. Jared Curtis. London: Bristol Classical, 1993.NOTE? Quotations from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are citedby line numbers and taken from the 1817 edition unless otherwisenoted.Works CitedBewell, Alan. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore:John Hopkins UP, 1999.Bowra, Maurice. The Romantic Imagination. London: OxfordUP, 1950.Cavell, Stanley. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticismand Romanticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.Ed. Paul H. Fry. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.???. Opus Maximum. Ed. Thomas McFarland. Princeton:Princeton UP, 2002.Ebbatson, J. R.“Coleridge’s Mariner and the Rights of Man.”Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 171-206.Empson, William. Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture.Ed. John Haffenden. London: Chatto & Windus, 1987.Fulford, Tim, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson. Literature, Scienceand Exploration in the Romantic Era. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2004.Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in theWays of the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.Pfau, Thomas.“The Philosophy of Shipwreck: Gnosticism,Skepticism, and Coleridge’s Catastrophic Modernity.”145