Abstract

Narcissism has long been associated with poets and poetry. As a concept, however, "narcissism" can describe a wide variety of phenomena. This dissertation has investigated narcissism as it seeks and discovers possibilities for sublimation. Through sublimation, the imagination formulates goals wherein the need for ontological extension can be most satisfied. Narcissistic sublimation seems especially effective for discovering new categories of desire and for freeing the will from conditions of paralysis and uncertainty. This study examines the works of six major authors: Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Shakespeare's Hamlet, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Yeats' Purgatory. In all these works the achievement of narcissistic sublimation occurs in relation to a lyric drive or "lyric moment" when the psyche encounters itself in a symbolic self-reflexivity and in so doing, discovers a new perspective upon its own being. In many of these works, the lyric moment works to sublimate more extreme forms of narcissistic need which exhibit an ethical imperialism in regard to others, and an ego-inflation in regard to the self. In other cases, the lyric moment achieves a new vision of the goal of desire, and hence frees for action a will that has become paralyzed by alienation and an inability to perceive "value" in human endeavors. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of the inescapable relation between narcissistic subjectivity and literary activity