Hello and thank you for your question.
I will note with all modesty that I memorized the Kubla Khan when I
was in high school [they made me do it] and I can recite it in full to
this day.
Anne Williams at the University of Georgia is perhaps the leading
modern/post-modern Coleridge specialist. You can review her output
at:
Anne Williams--Publications and Convention Papers
http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~awilliam/ears.html
Another writer, Susan Lewak, reviews Williams' essay "An I for an I"
and includes the following Williams quote:
"From the symbolic retrospect of language, the shooting represents an
experience inevitable in the attainment of selfhood and subjectivity:
separation from matter and from mater. This experience inaugurates
what Kristeva calls the thetic stage——the crucial, inexorable
emergence of a sense of self and not self——beginning with the mirror
stage and ending with the discovery of castration"
Coleridge: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
http://www.avatarmotion.net/susan/scholarship/scholar/rime.html
Here's an excerpt from another scholar's paper, which relies a good
deal on Williams and some other leaders in the field:
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a confusing story of the
supernatural and lends itself to the idea of "othering," and is itself
an "other" in its strangeness and illogical events, so critics find it
easy to use in any of those theories - Derrida, the feminists,
post-colonial studies, ethnic studies - that expound on such things.
"The Eastern Ancient Mariner," by Knox-Shaw, is a natural progression
in criticism of the Rime, since Coleridge himself used an Eastern
reference to explain the meaning of the poem, to defend its apparent
lack of moral: "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian
Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side
of a well and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and
says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date
shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son" (Coleridge,
qtd. in Williams 1125). Knox-Shaw continues McGann's historical
approach in divining sources of the poem, and finds Hindu myth and
Sanskrit writings and Indian tradition and taboos (for example,
against killing birds) as some of McGann's many layers.
....
"Anne Williams espouses similar themes, both feminist and
psychoanalytic. She discusses first of all the Mariner's audience's
discomfort with the poem's strangeness and Gothic elements, and
attributes that to a patriarchal society that must have reason and
sensibility, cause and effect. She castigates Freud for failing to
recognize the "power of the mother" and psychoanalyzes Coleridge's
need for mother."
Karey Perkins, THE MARINER IN THE MIRROR:
THE IRONY OF DEATH IN COLERIDGE'S RIME
http://www.atl.devry.edu/kperkins/facultyforum/documents/Perkins.asp
The above paper has an extensive bibliography. Most of the works
cited there are not accessible on the Web. I suggest you consider
tracking these down at a good university library if one is available
to you.
Here's a set of somewhat cryptic notes on several poems, written again
from a contemporary viewpoint:
Notes on Coleridge and "Christabel," plus brief notes on "Kubla Khan"
and "Frost at Midnight"
http://courses.csusm.edu/ltwr308bms/notes_on_coleridge_and.htm
Here's a review that touches on Coleridge's Lime Tree from a modernist
perspective:
The Architectonics of Multiplicity:
A Bakhtinian Critique of Three Books by Jack Stillinger
http://www.textual.org/text/reviews/greer2.htm
And here's a further treasure-trove of modern criticism of Coleridge
and his peers:
Conference Archive--Romantic Studies at the MLA, 1990-
Wordsworth-Coleridge Association Sessions
http://www.rc.umd.edu/features/conferences/archive/wca.html
As you probably realize, your question is quite open-ended, pointing
as it does to an area of criticm that's almost galactic in scope. May
I suggest that you check through these references, and then [before
rating this answer] please make a request for clarification if you
need further references or material in a particular area pertinent to
your original question.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
Good luck!
Search Terms Used
Coleridge Rime postmodern
Coleridge Kubla postmodern
Coleridge Lime psychological |
Clarification of Answer by
richard-ga
on
12 Aug 2002 11:48 PDT
The essay I called "An I for an I" in my answer is actually titled:
"An 'I' for an Eye: 'Spectral Persecution' in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner," PMLA 108, 5 (October, 1993) 1114-1127. [Reprinted in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner ed. Paul H. Fry. Case Studies in
Contemporary Criticism. New York and Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's
Press, 1999, 238-260.]
If you can locate the cited book of case studies, it will probably
give you everything you need in the way of modern critical studies of
that poem.
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