Abstract

This dissertation is a philosophical exploration of Percy Bysshe Shelley's language, relying heavily on the work of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Richard Rorty and pursued especially through readings of the poems Prometheus Unbound, The Revolt of Islam, and The Triumph of Life. I also look at much of the prose, including A Defence of Poetry, A Philosophical View of Reform, and "On Christianity." I argue that the kind of fissure, or aporia, that Derrida describes within language appears consistently in Shelley's work in the form of caves undermining what seem to be stable, solid landscapes. Partly from his reading of the Greek philosophers Shelley inherited an anti-dogmatic skepticism toward any truth-claims. He believed that any attempt--by a government, a religion, a culture, a language--to establish the appearance of natural truth and hide the cave-like emptiness beneath the surface should be subverted; and he used poetry to "consume the scabbard" of its own context and reveal those caves. ;Chapter I, "Demogorgon's Cave," shows the cave metaphor and the cave effect at work in Prometheus Unbound, and then surveys the Greek skeptical tradition . Chapter II, "More Caves," applies the paradigms and philosophies of the previous chapter to a broad range of Shelley's work to show how pervasive the skeptic cave is. In Chapter III, "Aporias," I turn to contemporary critical theory--especially de Man and Derrida--and argue that Shelley's caves are at the "center" of much of this work. The last chapter, "Action," explores the ethical ramifications of the cave condition; I examine both Hume's empiricism and Rorty's pragmatism as varying approaches to the dilemma posed by Shelley and the cave. ;All of Shelley's writing is deeply philosophical in its concern with this epistemological, ethical, and linguistic dilemma. Just as Shelley's mixture of philosophy and poetry was both thematic and intrinsic, the cave appears in his poetry both as an explicit image of undermining and as a corrosive effect--the perpetual effect of figurative language, which, to Shelley and the critics I discuss, is all language