"At Enmity with Joy": A postmodern reading of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode

Abstract

This paper explores Wordsworth's Ode to blindness and the loss of insight in a re-invented context of speculation and debate, as fractured, mediated and distorted by the pressure of humanist discourse, and as a partial allegory of the experimental text. In bringing the disruptive, solipsistic procedures of the poem into special prominence, the argument offers a strategically rebarbative and self-consciously antithetical critique of current vocabularies of representation.

Opsomming
Hierdie artikel ondersoek Wordsworth se Ode aan die blindheid en die verlies van insig binne 'n herontdekte konteks van bespiegeling en debat, as gebroke, indirek en verdraai onder die druk van humanistiese diskoers, en as 'n gedeeltelike allegorie van die eksperi­mentele teks. Deur die beklemtoning van die ontwrigtende solipsistiese prosedures van die gedig, !ewer die argument 'n strategies afstootlike en selfbewuste antitetiese kritiek van huidige terminologiee van representasie.