Frances Ferguson, "Coleridge and the Deluded Reader"
Homework Questions:
113:
-
Explain: "The criticism of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' reflects
a craving for causes" (113).
114:
-
What is wrong with the parenthetical citation of the indented quote
from Wordsworth?
-
Explain "the categories of poetic appreciation" that Wordsworth and
Coleridge "were explicitly attacking in Lyrical Ballads"(114).
116:
-
Explain: "The difficulty of the poem is that the possibility of
learning from the Mariner's experience depends upon sorting that experience
into a more linear and complete pattern than the poem ever agrees to do"
(116).
118:
-
Explain: "The Gloss provides a strange kind of clarity and unity"
(118).
-
Explain: "The Gloss comments . . . bespeak conclusions that do
not echo the main text because the main text never reaches such value judgments"
(118).
119:
-
Explain: "The Gloss . . . finds significance and interpretability,
but only by reading ahead of—or beyond—the main text" (119).
-
Explain "the cause-and-effect pattern" that "the main text never quite
offers" (119).
120:
-
Explain: "Intention and effect are absolutley discontinuous" (120).
123:
-
Explain: "Every interpretation involves a moral commitment with
consequences that are inevitably more far-reaching and unpredictable than
one could have imagined" (123).
125:
-
Explain: "Coleridge vented his spleen against common schemes of
the progress of knowledge" (125).
-
How, according to Ferguson, might Coleridge be like Milton's Satan?
126-27:
-
Explain Coleridge's "golden rule" about understanding the works of other
writers.
129:
-
Explain: "If you are what you read, plagiarism (in a more or less
obvious form) becomes inevitable" (128).
-
Explain Ferguson's suggestion that the Ancient Mariner capitulates to
the devil. Why is redemption the final topic addressed by the essay?
Other Discussion Questions:
117:
-
Explain: "All the evidences of moral value are mutually contradictory"
(117).
122:
-
What, according to Ferguson, is the main difference between the "literary
morals" of Barbauld and Coleridge?
-
Explain: "If reading and interpretation are the genesis of moral
action, they may be infinitely divorced for moral outcome" (122).
126:
-
Explain: "Reading involves one's entire set of beliefs about the
world" (126).
128:
-
Explain: "It seems that the reader can only read the texts that
say what he already knows" (128).
-
Explain: "A man must be virtuous to understand the understanding
of anyone else's knowledge—and thus to be virtuous" (128).