Abstract

In an 1805 letter to Sir George Beaumont describing his autobiographical poem The Prelude, William Wordsworth remarked that it was "a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself." Since then, critics have only affirmed Wordsworth's reputation as a poet, if not the poet, of selfhood and consciousness. Perhaps the most renowned scholarship on Wordsworthian subjectivity was produced by the so-called "Yale School" of the late twentieth century, as J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul de Man all published influential works on the topic. The latter two staked out stances on The Prelude in particular that continue to influence critical interpretations to this day. While Hartman viewed the poem as a text that portrayed the development of the subject into a unified whole, de Man argued instead that The Prelude represented a deeply unstable subject, the text representing the impossibility of capturing a unified "I." In recent years, it is de Man's interpretation that has informed much discourse surrounding The Prelude in the wake of increased attention on the posthuman subject, magnified by theorists like Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Rosi Braidotti. While The Prelude is still read by many as a deeply humanist text that posits a unified and autonomous concept of the self, others have emphasized its fragmentation, or even outright erasure, of the subject. Fully embracing neither of these approaches, this paper reconsiders the representation of subjectivity in The Prelude by arguing that, in the 1805 version in particular, Wordsworth articulated a singular self nonetheless composed of infinitely iterative, self-similar layers that resist final articulation. After considering the poem's complex revision history and apophatic rhetoric, I trace how Book I's anxious self-questioning, Book VI's belated Alpine revelation, and Book XIII's deferral of closure depict a subject that perpetually defers its own completion. Rather than achieve the end Wordsworth initially sought--the complete representation of his poetic development--The Prelude renders subjectivity through the lens of the infinite, an entity that, like a geometric fractal, reveals ever finer self-detail with each act of introspection, bounded yet inexhaustible. In doing so, the poem anticipates not the posthuman dissolution of the subject but a refiguration of selfhood as a process of perpetual becoming, or as Wordsworth phrases it, "something evermore about to be."

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; English

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/