Unspeakable Discovery: Romanticism and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Abstract

Coleridge's investment in aesthetics and criticism has broadly been understood as an attempt to overcome the Kantian bargain by which knowledge of the world is gained by relinquishing the thing in itself. This paper seeks to supplement that understanding by recasting the stakes of Kant's critical philosophy in terms of a conflict over the limits and possibility of “discovery.” Drawing on contemporary accounts of discovery by Captain Cook and George Shelvocke, the essay explores the critical role discovery plays in the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an historical practice of maritime expansion and mapping, as a textual event, and as an integral moment in the practice of literary criticism, which is to say, of “reading.” Maritime discovery in the Rime, the essay argues, allegorizes literary criticism, revealing both the promise and the limits of the romantic conception of literature as containing its own criticism.