@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00027889,
 author = {Koguchi, Ichiro},
 journal = {IVY},
 month = {Oct},
 note = {This study is an attempt to explicate two conflicting strategies for poetic originality working behind the French Books of The Prelude, based on Thomas Weiskel's theory of the Romantic sublime. The Romantic notion of the sublime is subdivided into the Kantian negative sublime and the egotistical sublime. In the Kantian category, the subject is first overwhelmed by something immense outside itself, but then, recognizing its own internal greatness which is independent of the phenomenal world, receives power greater than the one that resides in the external object. As implied in its dialectical process, this version of the sublime assumes a semiotic or symbolic reading of the transcendental into external phenomena, and at the same time is involved in the Oedipal phase, or struggle for priority with the superior symbolic father, which the subject confronts in external otherness. In terms of literary originality, it can be seen as a way for the modern poet to win a genuinely primary originality surpassing that of his precursor poets'. In contrast, the egotistical sublime is simply an indefinite aggrandizement of the phenomenal ego, excluding the possibility of negation or dialectic; hence there is no symbolic revelation as in the negative version. Psychoanalytically, the egotistical sublime is a rejection of the symbolic father so as to remain narcissism. In this sense, it is an attempt to secure a fictional, pre-Oedipal originality. When we look at the French Revolution in Books 6, 9, and 10 in light of the sublime, their strange features come to make sense as a disguised manifestation of the conflict between the two originality seeking strategies. As the revolution, a millenarian enterprise to subvert the patriarchal authority, compels Wordsworth to recognize his own patricidal wish as a revolutionary, he becomes divided between the drive toward the Oedipal stage and narcissistic regressive wish which his egotistical poetic nature intrinsically demands. This conflict becomes eventually dominated by the former. For, first by a family romance, "Vaudracour and Julia," and then by the commencement of a full-scale war between a nascent republic and the poet's fatherland, England, he is obliged to recognize his identity as a rebelling son. He finds his final tactic to turn away from this 0edipal direction in revealing Robespierre's death, that is, in vicariously killing the most typically rebellious son in the poem. Yet in spite of this seemingly successful but deceptive defense, we still sense in the text vestiges of unconscious breakthroughs into the negative sublime. And it is this paradoxical state that gives Wordsworth's poetry its unusual power. The paper finds its conclusion in the Snowdon episode. Since this passage identifies poetic imagination in connection with the same kind of conflicts of the negative and egotistical sublime as in the French books, we can infer that those political books, apparently antithetic to the poem's lyric theme, make an essential link to that conclusive passage by intimating the paradoxical nature of poetic originality. History, as otherness to the poet's lyric identity, has threatened him strongly enough to shake his egotistical world and guaranteed his poetry's liminal power.},
 pages = {41--65},
 title = {Imagining a Non-Regicidal Revolution : Strategies for Poetic Originality in the Revolutionary Books of The Prelude},
 volume = {27},
 year = {1994}
}