Abstract

This dissertation is a literary consideration of the philosophical thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman. I reevaluate their major epistemological texts, Coleridge's Aids to Reflection and Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, in the framework of deconstructive literary theory. By finding in Romanticism's elimination of an absolute distinction between poetry and prose and analogy of the deconstructionist erasure of distinction between reading and writing, my argument is that Newman's and Coleridge's enactments of a "performative prose" indicate a critique of language that is rooted in English Romantic critical theory and is yet consonant with contemporary considerations of the relation of language to philosophy. Their emphasis on the text as poem, performative of its arguments, transparent in its production by the writer, and insistent on the participation of its reader in the act of re-creating meaning, together emphasize the self-criticism of reading and the mutual relation among belief, will, and structure in the act of interpretation. Ultimately, Newman and Coleridge demand the subjective assertion of theological perspective in the structuring of knowledge. ;Coleridge uses language, in its fragmentation, over-determination, and emotional weight, in an enactment of its limitation to place the onus of intellectual discourse of the self-appropriation of the metaphysical and theological motivation that underlies any seemingly coherent discourse. Coleridge and Newman turn the tables on those who would argue that religious belief is a violation of intellectual integrity, by revealing that any level of philosophical coherence depends on an acknowledgement of first principles which cannot be reasoned to, but only assented to in an act of will, and a concomitant submission to experience. I argue that their susceptibility to post-structural analysis should be seen as a sign of their self-appropriation of a concept of language implicated in its own limitations. To the extent that each writer engages his reader in the performance of such limitations, so he succeeds in making room for positive assertions of religious value to serve as the reader's self-appropriated principles of rational coherence.