Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Abstract

Notions of play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. Indeed, the term is pervasive and seems to answer a shared need of expression to such an extent that it is one of those technical words that has found its way into everyday use. In this text, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and often object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, patriarchal poetics. Through attention to the transformations of rhetorical structures of representation and address performed by these works and to the frequent condensation of these transformations in figures of eating and drinking, the text makes available to inquiry a rich network of connections within the long Romantic tradition. At the same time, it forges new links between deconstructive reading practices, psychoanalysis and recent work in gender studies.