Looking In Wonder: Prenatal Sublimity and the Commonplace "Life" (original) (raw)
2008, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
This essay argues that popular images of the unborn by Lennart Nilsson and Alexander Tsiaras constitute a rhetorical commonplace, “life.” The condition of that commonplace is a relationship of sublime wonder with the unborn that aesthetically demarcates topography for discourse on the order of life. However, that sublime relationship is enacted through an indirect mode of address that does not require the feeling of awe to function. Further, it is not an ordinary commonplace but a heterotopic one that establishes a terminal through which one can locate each life in relation to genes, galaxies, forces of creation, and any other living creature.
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