Abstract

Because Emily Dickinson dramatises the reasoning which discredits "the transcendental ego" we need to understand her as well as philosophers understand Immanuel Kant. Toward that end, my dissertation argues that narratives about consciousness in Dickinson are "antitypes" ) to specific positions held in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. ;Still, the dissertation argues that philosophy and poetry are compatible forms of one inquiry. The difference that philosophy supposes and poetry disavows a final vocabulary is, as it were, the fault along which their homology occurs. There, the kind of complex homology that we learn from the physical sciences visits literary studies. It follows that literary theory guides our progress understanding Dickinson; but her own writing aids us as effectively, the way infected blood produces live vaccine. ;The dissertation dwells on overtly visual material in Dickinson's work in agreement with Richard Rorty's understanding that, "It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions." Visual disturbances in Dickinson's imagery signify disturbances within the logic from which "pure" reason devolves. The logic of pure reason disguises its historicity by invoking transcendental topoi which make history unthinkable: eternity, infinity, and God. The point is that Dickinson makes historical agency thinkable and visible. By showing us what a metaphysics is, she enables us to see the agency which distributes material resources unevenly, and empowers us to change it. ;In a word, my argument is that Dickinson wrote the critique of pure reason, and that even greater attention is due her