Autobiografia jako narzędzie badań historyka idei. Casus „Wspomnień niezależnego” Richarda Pipesa

The aim of the article is to develop a research tool for a historian of ideas in the form of an autobiography. It is about framing when a personal document meets the criteria of being a tool for a historian of political thought. The conclusions included the thought that the memories must be meta-considerations on the subject of written autobiography or an analysis of the problem of auto-biography within the framework of the created philosophy or history vision. Examples representing this narrative type were left by, among others, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, Robin G. Collingwood, and in Poland Stanisław Brzozowski. The volume of Richard Pipes’ memoirs, Memoirs of a Non-belonger, which is the foundation for the analysis, has also become part of the trend. The most important thinkers who have studied the issue of autobiography in depth include Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch. The conclusions of the analysis are as follows: autobiography has a philosophical and epistemological meaning in the field of knowledge about human nature. In this sense, autobiography becomes part of anthropology, while anthropology is the foundation for the history of ideas, including political thought.

Introduction

The introduction reimagines the historical narrative of rivalry between increasingly specialized cultures of medicine and the arts in the Romantic period as instead a period of mutual exchange. This familiar history is belied by the historical movement of the terms “autopsy” and “verve,” which traveled in opposite directions between medical and literary fields during the height of the British Romantic period. The crossing of “autopsy” and “verve” between fields introduces the book’s principal concerns: how shared concepts and critical practices were exchanged between letters and medicine, how new structures of thought crossed between biological and textual concerns, and how tropes of organicity, disease, and treatment in Romantic texts reveal the diagnostic practices that bridged literary and medical cultures. Through a study of the great developments in the history of medicine in this period, and the “metapothecaries” like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who considered literature and medicine through a shared ontology, the chapter argues that Romantic literature develops the notion of protocols of diagnosis—the idea that the same protocols of critical interpretation can be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand works of fiction and poetry. Outlining four protocols of diagnosis that the rest of the book will elaborate, the chapter concludes by linking these four formulations to modern methodologies of critical reading, exploring the resonance of this history to contemporary reflections on the history of what has come to be called “symptomatic reading.”

‘Two faces, each of a confused countenance’: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Contests of Authority

Thomas De Quincey exploits his rivalry with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to structure many of the key features of his most famous work, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821). De Quincey's idolization of Coleridge began early and survived the anger and disappointment he felt after the collapse of their friendship and his discovery of Coleridge's intellectual duplicity. In ‘Confessions’, De Quincey's accounts of himself as a scholar of Greek literature, Ricardian economics, and Kantean philosophy are all galvanized by his knowledge that Coleridge too has worked in these areas. As opium addicts, De Quincey's experience of the drug overlaps with Coleridge's in a number of ways, while De Quincey differs from Coleridge – at least on the surface – in his claims about both the moral implications of drugged euphoria and the resolve needed to defeat addiction.

Transcending Self-Consciousness: Imagination, Unity and Self-Dissolution in the English Romantic and Sufis Epistemology

English Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often recounts an individual life journey which depicts physical and spiritual pilgrimage and traverses both the inner and outer world to liberate the self and reach a revelatory moment of unification where the division between human mind and the external world is reconciled. For the Romantic poets this reconciliatory state cannot be achieved through rational investigation but via the power of imagination. In this regard, there is striking resemblance between the mystical and philosophical thought of Sufism and the idealistic thought of the English Romantic poets as they both strive for a sense of unification with the Divine or the Ultimate reality, and they both rely on imagination and intuitive perception to apprehend reality. Applying an analytical-comparative approach with specific reference to Northrop Frye’s anagogic theory (1957) which emphasizes literary commonalities regardless of direct influence or cultural or theological distinctions, this study endeavors to depict that certain Romantic poets’ longing for the reconciliation of subject and object dualism via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, echoes the mystic’s pursuit of transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divinely infinite. Through analysis of the concept of self-dissolution (fana) in Islamic mysticism and Sufi literature, particularly the poems of Jalal ad-Din Mohammad Balkhi (1207-1273) known in the West as Rumi, the outcome of this study reveals that the Romantics’ yearning for a state of reconciliation, which is prevalent in the major works of the Romantic poets such as William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821), corresponds to the mystic’s pursuit of unity or the Sufi’s concept of self-annihilation or fana.

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals of Scotland: The Creation of the Romantic Author

The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.

A Comparative Analysis of the Conversational Elements in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Frost At Midnight’ and Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab’s ‘ Marha Ghailan’

<p>The conversation poem is a genre of poetry mostly associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is usually characterized by being personal, emotional in nature, and often drawing on real events from the poet's life. This paper presents a comparative study of the conversational elements in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ and Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab’s ‘Marha Ghailan’. Similarity in focus, content, and style are going to be studied. In addition to that, certain points are going to be discussed and compared like; the minimalistic setting, the subjective experiences of both poets, the role of nature, the use of religion and myths, and the role given to the conversational partners. </p>

Who was the translator of the anonymous 1821 of Goethe’s Faustus? Could the translator have been Coleridge?

The 1821 translation of Goethe’s Faustus is not signed by the translator. We know who translated Friedrich Schiller’shistorical dramas ThePiccolominiand The Death of Wallenstein, for example, not because the translator identified himself as Coleridge but based on evidence from within and without. This article offers a three-part review to ‘Faustus’ from the German of Goethe translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ (Oxford University Press, 2007), edited by Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick. It argues that there is no definitive evidence during Coleridge’s lifetime or for centuries after his death that Coleridge was acting as an anonymous translator of Bossey’s text as Faustus.