Abstract

Poetry and fiction are manifestations of collective consciousness. They have a role similar to one described by Hegel when he wrote that art is one of the ways absolute spirit comes to consciousness of itself. For Hegel, however, all modes of thought lead ultimately to a realization of absolute spirit, and the more abstracted the thought is from ordinary reality, the closer it is to the absolute. An artist, on other hand, uses the materials of ordinary reality to awaken a reader or listener to an expanded consciousness which is not separate from ordinary reality but inclusive of it. This view has been held by various mystics and artists, as well as certain philosophers such as Bergson, but because of the emphasis on a material basis of consciousness in the last century and a half among most scientists and philosophers, the belief that there is a larger spirit or collective consciousness from which art and life derive is not accepted by most critics. ;In this dissertation I will show that the idea that consciousness is universal and, like Hegel's spirit, awakens individuals to its universality through art can not be separated from art and the creative process itself. Furthermore, I will provide examples from a number of writers from different cultures and time periods to show that this idea is central to many poems and to the most important works of fiction. Art---poetry and fiction in this case---has functioned as a vehicle for expanding consciousness and has been a manifestation of it. ;In the first chapter there is a general overview of the role of the collective consciousness, transcendentalism, and mysticism in the works of a number of authors, especially those from the modern period, between eighteenth-century neo-classicism and postmodernism. This role is thematic and artistic, and these works can not be adequately addressed unless collective consciousness and transcendentalism are taken into consideration. ;Modern critical theory has positioned art and mysticism at the periphery of literary studies, and this has been in keeping with a general demystification in philosophy and the sciences resulting from a pervasive and austere rationalism. In the second chapter I show that the basis for this has been an error, not only in respect to the works of art to which it is applied but also to its origins in a scientific system which postpositivistic science has questioned. ;In the third chapter I make a comparative study across different literatures and time periods to show that art is linked to both humanism and mysticism, and that these themes can not be adequately and honestly addressed by a theory that has no place for them. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters I relate this thesis in individual and comparative studies to the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges, T. S. Eliot, and Walt Whitman