| dc.description.abstract |
<p>"Scriblerian Ethics" proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the
writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be
better understood through an attunement to their orientation towards the Longinian
sublime and to the metamorphic poetics of Ovid. The project holds the negative and
critical features of the group's writing in abeyance, as it attempts to account for
the positive, phenomenological concepts and features of Scriblerian satiric and non-satiric
writing. The intensities and affiliations of Scriblerian writing that emerge from
this study gesture aesthetically and ethically beyond historical subjectivity to an
opening to alterity and difference. This opening or hope for the achievement ethical
dimension of writing is divulged as the intimate motivation of the literary or aesthetic
components that accompany the negative, referential, and critical features of Scriblerian
writing.</p><p>Examining closely the major writings of Pope and Swift in conjunction
with the collaborative writings of the Scriblerus club, the project describes the
concern with temporality that emerges from Longinian and Ovidan influence; the Scriblerian
reflexivity that culminates in a highly virtual aesthetics; and the ethical elaboration
of an orientation toward hospitality that emerges from this temporal and virtual aesthetic
orientation. A "Scriblerian ethics" is an affinity for a hospitality not yet achieved
in political, economic, and cultural life. Finally, the project analyzes throughout
its readings of Scriblerian writing the violence that nevertheless accompanies Scriblerian
aesthetics, examining the figures of modernity, criticism, and sexual violence (rape)
that permeate Scriblerian texts as barriers or resistances to the achievement of an
ethical orientation to alterity.</p>
|
|
