The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror.
This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex and instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers, and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime.
Satirizing Modernism examines 20th-century novels that satirize avant-garde artists and authors while also using experimental techniques associated with literary modernism. These novels-such as Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things-were under-recognized and received poor reviews at the time of publication, but have increasingly been acknowledged as both groundbreaking and deeply influential. Satirizing Modernism analyzes these novels in order to present an alternative account of literary modernism, which should be viewed neither as a radical break with the past nor an outmoded set of aesthetics overtaken by a later postmodernism. In self-reflexively critiquing their own aesthetics, these works express an unconventional modernism that both revises literary history and continues to be felt today.
In this book, Robert Doran offers the first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime, from the ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime (attributed to 'Longinus') and its reception in early modern literary theory to the philosophical accounts of Burke and Kant. Doran explains how and why the sublime became a key concept of modern thought and shows how the various theories of sublimity are united by a common structure - the paradoxical experience of being at once overwhelmed and exalted - and a common concern: the preservation of a notion of transcendence in the face of the secularization of modern culture. Combining intellectual history with literary theory and philosophical analysis, his book provides a new, searching and multilayered account of a concept that continues to stimulate thought about our responses to art, nature and human events.
This volume explores the relationship among beauty, violence, and representation in a broad range of artistic and cultural texts, including literature, visual art, theatre, film, and music. Charting diversifying interests in the subject of violence and beauty, dealing with the multiple inflections of these questions and representing a spectrum of voices, the volume takes its place in a growing body of recent critical work that takes violence and representation as its object. This collection offers a unique opportunity, however, to address a significant gap in the critical field, for it seeks to interrogate specifically the nexus or interface between beauty and violence. While other texts on violence make use of regimes of representation as their subject matter and consider the effects of aestheticization, beauty as a critical category is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the book aims to "rehabilitate" beauty, implicitly conceptualized as politically or ethically regressive by postmodern anti-aesthetics cultural positions, and further facilitate its come-back into critical discourse.
It is by no means a common fault that the very deliberation with which a book is prepared should be carried to the extent of actually lessening the effectiveness of the work as a whole. And yet we can scarcely doubt that such is the case with the book before us. The author seems to have so long entertained and so frequently revolved in his own mind the thought here presented, that its very familiarity to him has led him to presume too far upon the ease with which it is to be seized by other minds. We believe this to be the explanation of the extreme condensation of statement bordering more than once upon obscurity, for which the work is remarkable. Nevertheless, few books of the time contain thought that will so well compensate the earnest student for the trouble of overcoming such difficulties of style as are here found. We will attempt to indicate as briefly as possible the fundamental conceptions of the work. The author recognizes the necessity of setting out from presuppositions. And yet he plainly indicates that he considers it possible to set forth in complete form a philosophy of the world as a whole, which philosophy shall account for all its presuppositions. We believe, also, from the general tone of his work, that the author looks to the absolutely Rational or Spiritual as the ultimate substance and cause of the world. The ultimate philosophy is, then, a universal Logic which presents the fundamental forms or modes of the infinite, divine Thought or Reason that forms the world and is the world. For in that Thought and through that Thought all things move and have their being. - We need not, therefore, be startled when the author tells us that "physical perfection" is included as an element in "every ideal of the perfect life." For the physical is after all only a mode - and that the lowest, though an essential mode - of the spiritual. The total universe is a totality only by including all - the lowest as well as the highest-of its phases. But again thought, emotion, and will are also essential elements in every ideal of the perfect life; and such ideal can only be realized through the harmonious union and blending of these elements. But the author includes emotion and will under the one designation of the moral element. Thus "the three elements of our humanity" are: the physical, the intellectual, and the moral. Now it is the destiny of spirit (as Hegel has finely said) to struggle upward out of nature into spirituality. But this is not to announce an essential antagonism between nature and spirit. On the contrary, "nature" is but the unconscious mode of spirit; and, in struggling up out of nature, spirit only arises out of its state of unconsciousness, wherein it has been dominated by physical forces, into the state of complete consciousness, wherein it, in turn, dominates the forces of nature and puts them to its own uses. The higher the grade of consciousness, the more perfect the power to wield the forces pertaining to the realm of the unconscious. But again, this intensified consciousness involves the heightening of all the qualities or modes of the spirit. Increase in the vigor and subtlety of thought (at least in the ideally unfolding spirit) must go hand in hand with growing refinement of the emotional nature and with continuously added strength of will. In other words, there will be ever greater capacity to form lofty ideals, greater delight in contemplating them, and greater power to realize them. Thus, through the evolution of its own powers, the spirit approximates more and more nearly to the character of a creator-becomes more and more like the universal, divine Mind. -The Western, Vol. 7 [1881]
In 1975 the exhibition 'New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape' crystallized a new view of the American West. The sublime Americana vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture.
Examining a range of fantasy films released in the past decade, Pheasant-Kelly looks at why these films are meaningful to current audiences. The imagery and themes reflecting 9/11, millennial anxieties, and environmental disasters have furthered fantasy's rise to dominance as they allow viewers to work through traumatic memories of these issues.
