A Discipline of Submission: Themes of Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur
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Authors
Robert Vaughan
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Journal Article, Academic Journal
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Abstract
Allen Tate will likely always be identified as a “New Critic,” but modern scholars have tended to overlook the fact that later essays like “Literature as Knowledge,” “The Hovering Fly,” and “The Angelic Imagination” actually anticipated the looming revolution in critical theory. “The Angelic Imagination,” which focuses on several prose works of Edgar Allan Poe, specifically identifies the same cognitive disconnection the philosopher Paul Ricoeur would call “fallibility” more than a generation later. “Fallibility” is a concept central to Ricoeur’s theories of the will, and a Tate-Ricoeur dialectic highlights numerous other significant similarities in their philosophies. In particular, Tate’s notion of “tension” foresees key aspects of Ricoeur’s theories of metaphoricity. The congruence of their ideas merits Tate’s reintroduction into current discussions of hermeneutical phenomenology and post-structuralist theory.