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Arguing that contemporary theorizing often does not dwell sufficiently on a given artwork's capacity to solicit affective engagement by means of its complex structuring of relations between appearances and self-conscious reflection, this chapter delineates the transformative agency of self-conscious feelings, and pursues the implications of that agency for aesthetic theory, through a reading of Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud." This reading stresses inner sensuousness won by self-consciousness in ways that contest the reading offered by Marjorie Levinson. Inspired by New Materialist thinking allied with affect theory, she insists that at the end of the poem "the blur of self" melds into the dynamics of the natural scene. The argument here, by contrast, is that the poem dramatizes productive complexity within self-consciousness in ways that may be of value in emphasizing how human beings are capable of achieving affective intensities that are categorically distinct from the intensities that characterize animals and other non-human agents.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_10

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