A Close Reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Mont Blanc"

Room: Information Commons Lab, 1st Floor

This stanza-by-stanza reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" charts the unquiet movement of the poem through the vast, inhospitable landscape of the highest of the Alps in the early part of the nineteenth century. "Mont Blanc" draws out the tensions of the sublime encounter: humanity's conflicting attitudes of wonder and domination towards the natural world, revolutionary promise and failure, the uses of violence and the uses of imagination, the joy of liberation and the threat of annihilation. 

Rebecca Ariel Porte is a member of the Core Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is at work on a philosophy of paradise, Arcadia, and the Golden Age called On Earthly Delights and a book of essays about poems, Impossible to Take Alive. The latter is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.