| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 102 === This thesis aims to explore Anne Carson’s notion of the Sublime in Decreation. Reading the book through a psychoanalytical lens, I would like to argue that Carson leads us to see the fantasy of Kantain Sublime, to traverse the fantasy and ultimately to establish the feminine Sublime as the annihilation of the self. The thesis consists of five chapters. The introduction provides a brief description of Carson’s publishing career and the content of Decreation. The goal of the first chapter is to explore the history of the Sublime scholarship and to examine how Carson, in the essay “Foam,” combines different notions of the Sublime into one main concept: the self-annihilation. Chapter Two analyzes the suite of poems “Sublimes” on the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In my reading of “Ode to the Sublime,” Monica Vitti’s desire for everything demonstrates the aftermath of acquiring the experience of the Kantian Sublime: the Kantian subject is under the control of superegoic moral law. Carson portrays Vitti as a Sublime object in Kant’s gaze in the poem “Kant’s Question about Monica Vitti.” In the structure of the poem, the shift of lines indicates the possibility of traversing the fantasy of the Kantian Sublime, as the fictional Kant realizes that Vitti as the Sublime object is not what he has been led to believe. In the third chapter, by resorting to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, I attempt to examine the presence of the feminine subject as “not-all:” she is not only the subject of Kantian Sublime under the category of the phallus but also the subject of the Other jouissance. In the essay “Decreation,” the act of writing the ecstatic experience of the Other jouissance in relation to God brings the dissolution of the self, a fatal destruction of the subject caused by the death drive in an attempt to reach the real. In addition to the potential destruction, the death drive also points to the recreation in the symbolic order, echoing the title of the book “Decreation:” “to undo the creature in us” (167). This chapter ends with the poem “Gnosticism I,” which shows the process of decreation as a journey of self-questioning and self-struggling. This painful experience adds a new perspective to the discourse of the feminine Sublime. The conclusion reiterates that the psychoanalytic reading of Decreation allows us to see how Carson reinterprets the notion of the Sublime and brings a new perspective in discourse of the feminine Sublime.
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