Title:
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Laurence Sterne and an ethics of pleasure.
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This thesis proposes that an ethics of pleasure informs the destabilising elements of
Sterne's texts, delineated through the peculiar energies and vitality in his jesting
narrative voice. I demonstrate the Sternean synthesis of two problematic principles,
ethics and pleasure, incompatible for the modem mind but complementary for
Eighteenth century moralists. Sterne's configuration of ethical pleasure can be
differentiated from those of major moral discourses of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century: 1) by his distinctive ethical position which enfranchises laughter, gaiety, and
mirth which his contemporaries underplay; 2) through a Rabelaisian humour which
Bakhtin sees as exemplifying signs of Renaissance folk and peasant culture, so
creating a distance from the progressivistic zeal of the Enlightenment; 3) in his
conjunction of Fideistic scepticism with Rabelaisian grotesque, which absorbs and
transfigures a sense of the plenitude and the inexplicability of nature.
The first chapter examines Sterne's incorporation of a "heteroclite" perspective
into orthodox latitudinarian theism in his sermons, in the specific forms of his
selectiveness in adaptations or borrowings from various divine homilies. The second
chapter compares his ethics of pleasure with major contemporaneous moral discourses,
focusing on the production of different moral frameworks through differing
perceptions of man's place in nature. The third chapter locates Sterne's formulation of
text and narrative in a material presence of communion and fellow-feeling among
disparate sUbjectivities. The fourth chapter investigates the ethical significance of
Sterne's particular use of laughter, in which he tries to re-enact the laughing spirit of
Rabelaisian grotesque with partial success, thus suggesting his comic spirit be
identified as Romantic grotesque. A fmal chapter concludes with Sterne's attempt to
test his ethics through interlocution and engagement with strangers in A Sentimental
Journey, charting the pragmatic obstacles to a praxis of love for the concretised being.
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