The Western Theory of Tradition

Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime

J. Gary Taylor, Patricia J. Scharlin

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 1989
• eBook ISBN: 9780300160536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This elegantly written book offers a new way to conceive of cultural tradition. Sanford Budick reveals an operative concept of Western cultures that has been only partially understood: according to this concept, the act of freely receiving and handing on cultural tradition and the act of achieving moral and aesthetic freedom in sublime representation are the same phenomenon. This dual phenomenon Budick calls the cultural sublime, and he traces it in literary, philosophical, and artistic works from Homer, Virgil, and the Bible to Rembrandt, Milton, Kant, Baudelaire, Freud, and Sarraute.

Budick shows that if we cannot accomplish the cultural sublime, the act of tradition-making becomes impossible and the sublime degenerates into a pseudo-sublime. Thereafter, what claims to be tradition is no more than pure coercion that employs a pseudo-sublime as an instrument of victimization. By describing the terms and paradigms of the cultural sublime, Budick distinguishes tradition from pseudo-tradition and the structures of sublime representation from those of a pseudo-sublime. The making of tradition, he asserts, is always a struggle against the representations of a pseudo-sublime.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Cultural Sublime: Descartes, Kant, and Rembrandt
• 2. The Cultural Sublime: Descartes, Kant, and Rembrandt
• 3. The Second-State Self in the Scene of Victimization and Resistance: Hegel and Virgil
• 4. The Surrealism of “Respect” for Tradition: Virgil, Homer, Kant
• 5. Apostrophe in the Westering Sublime: The Matrilineal Muse of Homer, Virgil, Dryden, Pope, and T. S. Eliot
• 6. Counterperiodization and the Colloquial:Wordsworth and “the Days of Dryden and Pope”
• 7. The Reinvention of Desire: Milton’s (and Ezekiel’s) Sublime Melancholia
• 8. Self-Endangerment and Obliviousness in “Personal Culture”: Goethe’s “Manifold” Tasso
• 9. The Modernity of Learning: Baudelaire’s and Delacroix’s Tasso “roulant un manuscrit”
• 10. Limping: Freud’s Experience of Death in His Tassovian Line of Thought
• 11. The Real in the Commonplace: Sarraute’s Feminine Sublime of Culture
• 12. Of the Fragment: In Memory of Our Son Yochanan
• Notes
• Index