Pleasure Domes and Sunbeams: An Anti-Oedipal Reading of “Kubla Khan”

• Authors: Tindol Robert
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan” begins with the statement that Kubla Khan once caused a pleasure-dome to come into existence by dint of a kingly decree. The last line states that the narrator, should he gain suffi cient poetic vision, would have “drunk the milk of paradise” and would “build that dome in air.” A new reading may be derived from a focus on precisely what these lines say and what they imply within the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work Anti-Oedipus. If the process of the narrator’s gaining poetic insight is set in motion by a conscious decree from Kubla Khan, then an Anti-Oedipal reading considers whether the end result is simply the consequence a powerful individual’s wishes, or else is paradoxically a liberation from those wishes.

Keywords

EN

Anti-Oedipus; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Orient; interpretation; Romanticism

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2017
• Issue: 26/1
• Pages: 55-72

Contributors

author

Tindol Robert

• Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

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