Literature
Sublime
In literature, the term "sublime" refers to a quality of greatness or beauty that inspires awe and wonder. It often conveys a sense of the transcendent or the ineffable, evoking powerful emotions and a sense of the infinite. The sublime is often associated with nature, and it has been a recurring theme in literature, particularly in Romantic and transcendentalist works.
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10 Key excerpts on "Sublime"
- Robert Doran(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Introduction We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship with absolute emotions. – Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now” (1948) 1 We also speak of the beauty of Newton’s unification of the movements of the planets and the movements of projectiles. We saw the discovery of DNA offers us a “beautiful” way to explain processes of biological evolution. The Sublime, by contrast, neither integrates nor unifies. It transcends. – Richard Rorty 2 The Sublime is one of the most important and often-discussed concepts in philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and art history. Meaning “loftiness,” “height,” or “elevation” and typically associated with notions of ecstasy, grandeur, terror, awe, astonishment, wonder, and admiration, the Sublime refers at once to a specific discourse, the theory of sublimity, and to an experience, 3 that of transcendence, which has its origins in religious belief and practice. 4 As this study will contend, it is the tension between a literary-aesthetic concept and an experience with mystical-religious resonances that motivates the critical concept of sublimity, creating multilayered nexuses between religion, art, nature, and society. This study starts from the presupposition that the critical horizon and reception of the Sublime is framed in large measure by three classic or 1 Newman, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, 173. 2 Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendicta, 70. 3 Of course, “experience” has its own discursive norms, which will be elucidated herein. However, unlike the mystic’s experiences, which are esoteric, aesthetic experience is shared. 4 As Baldine Saint Girons notes, “the ‘first men’ no doubt had no reason to distinguish aesthetic values from religious values” (Fiat Lux: Une philosophie du Sublime, 25, my translation). 1
eBook - PDFThe Sublime in Modern Philosophy
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature
- Emily Brady(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Specifically, in contrast to smaller and less powerful things – beautiful things, for instance – Sublime phenomena simply throw too much at perception, making them challenging to grasp all at once. Imagination is not engaged in an associative play, bringing images to bear in an easy fashion; instead, imagination is expanded and invigorated as it tries to cope with greatness. This mental activity brings along with it feelings of anxiety, astonishment, and pleasure, as we feel uplifted in spite of – and because of – the challenge. We are familiar with the ways in which poetic works became common examples of the Sublime, for example, Milton’s Paradise Lost . Here, the poet engages the reader’s imagination through strong, expressive language and concrete imagery of terrible things. We might also turn to literature and its depic- tions of great, melancholic landscapes (the novels of Thomas Hardy come to mind). There is no question that imagination is engaged and enlivened in these cases, such activity being an important device for literary effect, but the forcefulness is determined by the medium, so that we have, say, a literary or poetic Sublime, rather than an original Sublime. Of course, the literary arts capture sublimity differently than the visual arts, and usually fare better than painting in historical accounts, no doubt because of the influential tradition of Sublime style. Moreover, the sig- nificance of literature and poetry for the Sublime even works in the opposite direction, according to some eighteenth-century theorists; that is, some parts of nature may become more Sublime through associations from literature. 18 Alison makes this point more strongly, arguing that some places become Sublime through associations from art and litera- ture, for example, depictions of Hannibal crossing the Alps (1871, 76).
eBook - PDFThe Greening Of Literary Scholarship
Literature, Theory, and he Environment
- Steven Rosendale(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- University Of Iowa Press(Publisher)
Dennis, in writing of how, in the Sublime, “the soul is amazed by the unexpected view of its own surpassing power,” revealingly reflects that “greatness of mind is nothing but pride well regulated” (Ashfield and de Bolla 30). The question is, of course, how well regulated this pride might be, given that the Sublime would appear at first sight to be the most obvious instance in the aesthetic realm of feeling overwhelm-ing all other faculties of the mind. The very immediacy, the conviction of authenticity, in the Sublime arose from the fact that it was, almost by definition, transporting and ir-resistible. Longinus had described how sublimity in poetry “exerts an irre-sistible force and mastery, and [gets] the upper hand with every hearer” (100). Reynolds describes it as that which “impresses the mind at once with one great idea; it is a single blow,” an effect that “so overpowers and takes such possession of the whole mind, that no room is left for attention to minute criticism” (62, 242). It took no very great effort of imagination to see how closely allied such an effect might be to that enthusiasm that was, for the age, the chief enemy of both reason and morality. Dennis, for 234 : RETHINKING REPRESENTATION AND THE Sublime example, who described the Sublime as a “pleasing rape upon the soul,” defines it as “nothing else but a great thought, or great thoughts moving the soul from its ordinary situation by the enthusiasm which naturally at-tends them” (45 – 47). Even after the derogatory meaning of the word “en-thusiasm” was firmly established, writers continued to use it to character-ize the experience of sublimity, though usually with a preliminary caution to the reader to the effect that the “enthusiasm” under discussion was not to be confused with that “enthusiasm” that might be conceived to proceed from an overheated and distempered imagination and to imply super-stition or madness.
eBook - PDFWords of Eternity
Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime
- Vincent Arthur De Luca(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
2 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 57. 3 Addison, for example, tells us that "our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views"; according to Johnson, "[The Sublime is] that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration." Here is a sampling of similar contempo- rary opinions: 'The Sublime . . . takes possession of our attention, and of all our faculties, and absorbs them in astonishment"; "[the Sublime] imports such ideas presented to the mind, as raise it to an uncommon degree of elevation, and fill it with admiration and astonishment"; "objects exciting terror are . . . in general Sublime; for terror always implies astonishment, occupies the whole soul, and suspends all its motions." See, respectively, Works of Joseph Ad- BLAKE'S CONCEPT OF THE Sublime 1 7 strates. There is a marked ambiguity in the play of these figures. At the moment of astonishment, when the power of the Sublime manifests itself, the mind becomes utterly open to the influx of what it beholds ("filled with its object"), and yet this flood of power into the mind produces no kinetic transfer of energy to the mind's faculties, but rather the reverse—a suspen- sion of internal motion, a total arrest. Atfirstappearing entirely permeable, the mind instantly becomes impenetrable, like a container packed to the choking point ("so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other"). The mind is quite stopped ("suspended"), only to be "hur- ried"; its internal density becomes crushing, and yetfinallyit is easily car- ried along.
eBook - PDF- David Vallins(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Transcendence in Literature and the Visual Arts 95 bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation! He described the Sublime as contradis- tinguished from the beautiful. Beauty consisted in the relation of parts to the whole. The Sublime was an image of which you neither see the wholeness, nor the parts. Here the lecturer read Milton’s description of the form of Satan, floating in the sea, as an instance of the true Sublime; and described the image impressed on the mind, in language and figure so fugitive and evanescent, that he became the poet he described—hurrying his thoughts over our minds so as only just to enable us to see that they were, ere they were not. We had glimpses of them, but could not, and would not grasp them. (Lects 1808–19, 1: 401–2) From his notes on Paradise Lost (c. 1818) 22 Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the Paradise Lost. It is not an arithmetical Sublime like Klopstock’s, whose rule always is to treat what we might think large as contemptibly small. Klopstock mistakes bigness for greatness. There is a greatness arising from images of effort and daring, and also from those of moral endurance; in Milton both are united. The fallen angels are human passions, invested with a dramatic reality. The apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book is particularly beautiful as an intermediate link between Hell and Heaven; and observe, how the second and third book support the subjective character of the poem. In all modern poetry in Christen- dom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object, the reflective character predominant.
eBook - PDF- James Kirwan(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Thus nature is here called Sublime merely because it raises the imagination to the point of presenting those cases in which the mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature. 37 The moment of the dynamic Sublime is then constituted by much the same ‘check and discharge’ of feeling as the mathematical Sublime: we realize our weakness and at the same time discover, through regarding the object as a chal-lenge rather than as simply overwhelming, a sense within us that estimates ourselves as independent of nature and superior to it. In both cases the mind abandons itself to the imagination and to reason without a de fi nite end, and feels itself elevated in its own estimate of itself on fi nding ‘the entire power of the imagination inadequate to its ideas’. 38 It would appear, then, that the Sublime arises whenever we thank God, or more properly ourselves, for our unconquerable souls. ‘ That is Sublime ’, asserts Kant, ‘ which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses ’. 39 Sublimity, in Kant’s account, renders intuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties over our sensibility, and it is this intuition, coming hard on an intuition of the ‘abyss’ of our impotence, that is, in itself, su ffi cient as a cause for the feeling of pleasure we experience. The peculiar feeling of sublimity, then, is explicable in terms of this double movement of feeling, this vibration between repulsion and attraction, peril and rescue; an intuition of the inadequacy of the imagination combined with a rejoicing at what this inadequacy indicates. In the Sublime the mind feels itself empowered to pass beyond the con fi nes of sensibility, and does so at the very moment these con fi nes are made most apparent.
eBook - PDF- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
The Natural and the Sublime 515 beauty of the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty. I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary. But to what end, in many cases, this was designed, I am unable to discover; for I see no greater reason for a connection between man and several animals who are attired in so engaging a manner, than between him and some others who entirely want this attraction, or possess it in a far weaker degree. But it is probable, that Providence did not make even this distinction, but with a view to some great end; though we cannot per-ceive distinctly what it is, as his wisdom is not our wisdom, nor our ways his ways. from P ART 2 Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime T he passion caused by the great and Sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which em-ploys it. Hence arises the great power of the Sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the Sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. Terror No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
eBook - PDF- R. Bleiker(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Definitions of the Sublime usually begin with attempts to distinguish it from the beautiful. Kant, for instance, differentiated between aesthetic judge- ments about taste, which deal with the beautiful, and judgements about the Sublime. Beauty is seen as something that brings pleasure and comfort. It is associated with a calm sense of harmony. The Sublime, by contrast, is linked to excitement and astonishment. But it also involves awe and respect, even pain and terror. Both Kant and Burke illustrate emotions associated with the Sublime through examples drawn from the experience of observing natural phenomena. They contemplate the encounter of our minds with momen- tous forces, such as thunderclouds and storms, hurricanes and volcanoes: phenomena that are so overpowering that they are not just awe-invoking, but simply too vast to be comprehended in their totality. Kant writes of how these forces become all the more attractive due to their fearfulness, for if we are in a secure enough position we find that Sublime experiences raise our soul above the level of everyday routine. 7 For Burke, the result of such experiences is a ‘delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror’. And he asks how such seemingly opposed sentiments could be experienced in combination: But if the Sublime is built on terror, or some passion like it, which has pain for its object; it is previously proper to enquire how any species of delight can be derived from a cause so apparently contrary to it. 8 The contradictory encounter of pain and delight, horror and pleasure, is not limited to the experience of natural phenomena. One could extend the insights provided by Burke and Kant so that they can be applied to the cultural and political sphere as well. Gothic churches, for instance, are not simply designed to be beautiful. They are supposed to evoke the awe-inspiring effects of the Sublime.
eBook - PDF- Robert R. Clewis(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
So one main difference I see is that the Sublime is an aesthetic response, involving aesthetic attention, but awe is a more general response and need not be aesthetic. Another difference has to do with the phenomenology of awe and the Sublime. The former seems an entirely humbling sort of experience. Martha Nussbaum writes, for instance that in “awe I want to kneel.” 11 The emphasis here as well as in Keltner and Haidt’s analysis seems to be on accommodation, submission, and on one’s own humility with respect to the vast object/environment/person, whereas the paradigmatic phenomenology of the Sublime involves a feeling of humility but also a feeling of exaltation of the self. Consider, for example, one of the archetypical (though by now almost Kitsch) German Romantic paintings meant to capture and evoke a Sublime response, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog. Note that the solitary wanderer in this painting, whose back faces us so that we are invited to take his perspective, is in the dead center of this painting, on a craggy, mountain pedestal, as it were. And note also Figure 3 Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer , Caspar David Friedrich, circa 1818, Hamburger Kunsthalle / bpk Bildagentur / Photo: Elke Walford / Art Resource, NY. The Sublime Reader 332 that while he is likely overwhelmed by the vastness and mysteriousness of the landscape, he is distinctly not kneeling. If he were kneeling, that would certainly express an emotion of awe. But by contrast, he stands proudly atop the peak, one knee jutting forward, one elbow jutting out, his jaunty walking stick completing the tripod on which he is balanced. It is an image that depicts and evokes simultaneously feelings of humility and exaltation (the Sublime) rather than humility and accommodation (awe).
eBook - PDF- Melissa McBay Merritt(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
11 The Sublime a moral health, a proper expression of the human being as an essentially rational animal. 2.3 Early German Rationalism on the Sublime To find sublimity explicitly conceived as absolute greatness, we need to turn to the German tradition of aesthetic rationalism that developed from Alexander Baumgarten’ s 1750 Aesthetica. 28 German aesthetic rationalism is rooted in the distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition developed by Leibniz and Wolff: sensible cognition grasps in a ‘confused’ manner what can only be grasped ‘distinctly’ through the intellect’ s explicit, and principle-based, articulation of the parts of a thing and determination of its place in a systematic whole. But while the rationalists take sensible cognition to be confused in its very nature, they recognise that it can nevertheless be clear – vividly present to mind – and may even possess a perfection proper to its nature. Baumgarten introduces aesthetics as a practical ‘science of sensible cognition’ (Aesthetica §1 [2007:10–11]) that has the ‘perfection of sensible cognition’ as its ‘purpose’ – where this perfec- tion is nothing other than beauty (Aesthetica §14 [2007:20–1]). He lists six aspects of beauty, the second of which is the ‘aesthetic magnitude’ of the cognition – or, effectively, its sublimity (Aesthetica §22 [2007:24–5]). 29 Hence, sublimity is an aspect of beauty for Baumgarten and his followers, rather than essentially distinct from it. But what is ‘aesthetic magnitude’? Georg Meier, Baumgarten’ s student and self-professed expositor, explains this magnitude as the greatness of what is represented: a cognition with aesthetic magnitude represents ‘great, suitable, important, noble objects’, and does so in a manner suitable to such dignified content. 30 Although this arguably sums up Baumgarten’ s conclusions on the topic, Baumgarten himself begins with the more literal notion of magnitude as greatness in size.
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