Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
The Romantic Spirit and the Quest for Self-Mastery, is an examination of the Poet in conflict with the State and how Time, as a phenomenological measuring for understanding and conceptualizing self and State, determines the relationship between the two. My concept of the Poet is perceived through the re-telling and cross-comparison of the Faustian myth, with Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf as the poetic figure, and the Surrealist space of the Magic Theater as a framing of Consciousness in the fractured place of the modern city. Looking at Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, I illustrate how the Poet is a being-towards-death. Here, I explore how his tragedy is his finitude and his facticity, while concluding that being is a fact without a reason. As such, I propose a new vision of the poetic figure’s phenomenological experience of Time as essential for understanding the conflict with State and selfhood. I analyze how the Quest for Self-Mastery is a recognition of limits, and of boundaries the Poet encounters in his aim to exceed that which he is, a finite being who has the ability in his mind to achieve heights the physical world and its limits on his fortitude and his finitude challenge him from claiming.
This dissertation takes modernity as its starting point in an examination of consciousness in conflict with ruling systems and regimes of power, placing special emphasis on the twentieth century and the two competing authoritarian powers of the Soviet and German occupation. I trace the experience of the Poet in conflict with the State across a number of real and surreal spaces while considering what it is that the State is so determined to extinguish in the poetic. Here, I argue that there is something in human being that cannot be reduced. What is this irreducibility? And where can it be found? We encounter the poetic, this anarchical force, in our encounters with desire and romantic love. Why is romantic desire such an anarchical force, and so oppositional to the State? This dissertation will examine romantic desire as an anarchical force, while considering the act of thinking itself and why totalitarian regimes attempt to control and even extinguish both romantic desire and independent thought. The Quest for Self-Mastery, I argue, is a measuring between the mind’s infinite limits and the physical world of which he is a part and that anchors him to a finite space. I propose that the answer to this overcoming for the Poet is language, his refuge, which moves towards a becoming which endures beyond his reach.
Date
7-29-2025
Recommended Citation
Stingle, Stacy L., "THE ROMANTIC SPIRIT AND THE QUEST FOR SELF-MASTERY ON THE FINITE WINGS OF THE IRREDUCIBLE: THE POET IN CONFLICT WITH THE STATE" (2025). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 6897.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/6897
Committee Chair
Francois Raffoul
DOI
10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.6897
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Political Theory Commons