Things to Consider:

• Types of Sacrifice (Sacred vs. Profane)
• French Revolution
• Slave Trade and Abolitionist Movement

• What is Modiano's main subject? Specifically, is this an essay about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or about criticism of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?  Explain.
• What, then, is Modiano's central argument?
• How does Modiano utilize secondary source discussion to support her thesis?  Provide specific examples of references to other sources.

• Explain:  "McGann's own project is entirely parallel to Coleridge's" (189).
• See McGann's essay

• Explain:  "Coleridge's religious utterance . . . is so varied and shifting that any paradigm such as McGann's looks like a straight road that conveniently bypasses the actual maze of Coleridge's thought" (190).
• Explain:  "The focus of a historical method should precisely be on the differences between time-bound and circumstance-bound  points of view" (190).

• What according to Modiano, is the significance of Keane's book?

• How according to Modiano, is Keane's argument contradictory?

• Why, according to Modiano, were relevations about human sacrifice in Dahomey "a lucky find" for slave traders?

• To what degree, according to Modiano, are Abel and Christ comparable? Explain.

• What, according to Modiano, is Coleridge's most significant revision of the Cain-Abel myth?

• Explain:  "Generalized violence, like an infernal God, arbitrarily picks it victims and turns people into unwitting instruments of violence; . . . at such times the distinguishing boundaries between friends and foes, brothers and murderers disappears" (208).

• Explain:  "In killing the Albatross the Mariner instinctively destroys [the] very assumption of brotherly love and unity for which he finds no immediate corroboration in the ice-bound and distinctly hostile environment around him, nor for that matter did Coleridge find much evidence of it in his world" (209).

• Explain:  "In any substitutive process the exchanged objects maintain a link with each other" (211).

• Explain:  "The presence in the poem of Christian symbols is unmistakable, but it only heightens the pathos of an ideal that is irretrievably lost, as the substitution of the cross with the Albatross powerfully conveys" (215).

• Explain:  "Coleridge himself, it turns out, composed a poem that specifically addressed the question of the cultural transmission and interpretation of texts, by constructing a narrative with several textual layers and temporal frames" (188).  Whose ideas are these?

• What are "symbolist Christian hermeneutics" (189).

• Explain:  "It is only when works are perceived as truly historical products that they become transhistorical" (191).

• Explain: McGann "reads the poem in terms of a conventional Christian plot that writes despair out of the picture" (192).

• What "two incontrovertible facts about the poem" does Empson propose (193)?

• What problem(s) does Modiano have with Empson's argument?

• Explain:  "In interpretations of 'The Ancient Mariner' an 'inside' may be related to an 'outside,' a 'psychology' to a 'history'" (195).

• Explain the two types of guilt that Kitson sees at work in Coleridge's poem.

• Explain: "The French Revolution dealt a powerful blow to traditional ways of reading the universe in sacramental terms and rendered fragile all romantic attempts at 'sacramentalizing' the 'natural--and historical process'" (197).
• What two "conflicting perspectives on violence" account for this situation?

• Explain:  "It was not just the French Revolution, but also the slave trade that put into circulation and gave new life to the paradigm of sacrifice, fueling the Romantics' keen sense that rituals of human sacrifice were not a thing of the past, but a most distressing contemporary practice" (202).
• What three contextual frameworks exist for the consideration of sacrifice in Coleridge's poem?
• What is a "foundation sacrifice" (202)?

• What, according to Modiano, is the significance of Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary's entries on genii and demons?

• In what way(s), according to Modiano, does the Mariner carry a dual identity?

• Explain:  "At the beginning of the poem there are certainly no signs whatsoever of a sacramental unity of deity, man, and beast" (206).

• What, according to Modiano, is the significance of the theme of hunting to Coleridge's poem?

• How, according to Modiano, does the Cain-Abel story connect to the slave trade?
• How, according to Modiano, are the Albatross and the Mariner similar?

• To what degree, according to Modiano,  can the Albatross be associated with Christ?

• To what degree, according to Modiano, can the Mariner be associated with Christ?

• Explain: "The Mariner himself is confronted with the incongruity between a live bird and a world with no other evidence of living creatures" (212).

• Explain:  "The poem conveys a strong sense that violence does not begin with the slaying of the Albatross but antecedes it" (213).

• Explain:  "The Mariner is stunned by his own act of violence, which is disconnected from his self, and ultimately incomprehensible" (214).
• How, according to Modiano, does the Mariner embody the condition of slavery?