English Romantic literature.
                    Greek tragedy, philosophy, archaic lyric and oral verse.
                    Latin poetry (Augustan).
 
 

        This study considers some of the ways in which the presentation of ethical and aesthetic matters are coordinated in the tragedy of Sophocles and Percy Shelley. Using a method developed from the aesthetic discourses of Aristotle, Kant, Shelley  and Nietzsche, I demonstrate that the aesthetic effects of Oedipus the King and Shelley’s Cenci depend upon the communication of certain specifically ethical agenda. These works involve a representation of  an indeterminate, aesthetic moment or moment of exigency or aporia of the literary subject which, despite its indeterminacy remains ethical.

         I propose that these Sophoclean and Shelleyan dramas present their protagonists, Oedipus and Beatrice Cenci, with extreme and inexplicable situations that confound the intelligibility of circumstance and  severely impede the possibilities of  moral and physical action. In this, the aporia of tragedy is a singular event, a pathos of reason, a deterioration of the capacity of these subjects to construct a rational interpretation either of their circumstances or of themselves. Despite this reversal of the possibility of natural appearances as the ground of a rational identity, however, the tragic aesthetic involves the presentation of an indeterminate state that remains adequate to communicating the suffering of the tragic subject even apart from the normal discursive grounds of the possibility either of its identity or an intelligible experience. The production of tragedy generates a certain subjective or indeterminate affective state, a quandary in which the material powers of sensation and feeling attain a sort of subjective formality that is, as such, capable of communicating the extreme situation of the tragic subject independent of the determinate structures of discursive reasoning and objective formulations of identity. In this, we have a case for the capacity of the aesthetic to signify the pathos of its subject but nothing more determinate. In the absence of their determination by structures of determinate discourse, tragic drama allows the subjective elements of cognition come into their own right as an aesthetic state.