Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2018
Abstract
Using Deleuze's concepts of "involuntary," "rhizomatic" memory, the article demonstrates that in the 1799 text of the poem imagination is an "effect" of immense quantity of differences among impressions, rather than a power synthesizing these differences. Instead of producing a continuity of subjective consciousness, imagination transforms the material of art into a specific "style" based on what Deleuze in Proust and Signs calls "transversals." Later texts of The Prelude are characterized by tendencies to control this open and nonhierarchical concept of imagination by the dominant (individual or absolute, divine) subjectivity.