The Sense of the Sublime PART ONE: Ch. 1 The Discourse of the Sublime: Lexis, Semantics, Rhetoric, Style (original) (raw)
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Introduction 'The Early Histories of the Sublime' of Special Issue Lias
When thinking about the sublime, most people would spontaneously refer to an aesthetic experience -be it in nature, in art or in the self -that destabilises us, that evokes conflicting emotions of awe and fear, of horror and fascination, or that escapes our human understanding. codified by edmund burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, the sublime often appears as the impressive and the awe-inspiring that is opposed to the orderly and balanced nature of the beautiful. In this (simplified) narrative, the sublime is then often historicised as a relatively late concept or, as Jean-françois Lyotard would have it, as a mode of sensibility that is specific to modernity itself. however, the sublime is a much older notion and cannot be confined to the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. originally, the sublime is a rhetorical concept that finds its main source in the treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sub lime), probably written in the first century Ad by an anonymous author, who is generally referred to as Longinus. the importance of On the Sublime resides in the fact that it deals with the strong persuasive and emotional effect of speech or literature on the listener or reader. It addresses the question of how language can move us deeply, how it can transport, overwhelm, and astonish the reader or listener. It destabilises so to speak the fixed position between a reader, an author and a text or speech. 'for the true sublime', Longinus writes, 'naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.' 1 So already from its very beginnings the sublime appears as a profoundly liminal concept that questions the boundaries between representation and the subject beholding it. As emma Gilby has argued elsewhere, the Longinian sublime is always about 'an encounter'. 2 It creates a close contact, or even a clash, with the object represented, while it also establishes a deep, indeed intimate, communication between an author and a reader or listener through a text or speech.
The Aestheticity of the Sublime 1
Nora Schleich, 2021
In this paper, I wish to show that it is particularly the aestheticity of the sublime that plays the crucial role for the sublime’s characteristic feature—namely, instigating the subject’s consciousness of its own pure rational capacity. This unique aesthetic experience concerns the human subject’s mental disposition of the mind according to a unique specific character: the interplay between sensible and natural determination, and the predisposition to spontaneity and autonomy, is palpable as a unique kind of feeling. The state of the mind during the contemplation of the natural object, as well as the subject’s relation to its intelligibility, are crucial in aesthetic experience. As regards the purity of the aesthetic moment, reason, a commanding and objectifying faculty, is to be excluded as being responsible for the occurrence of the sublime. Instead, wemust concentrate on the faculty that is in charge of processing the manifold of sensible impressions: the faculty of imagination.
NOTES ON THE AESTHETIC CONCEPT SUBLIME
The aesthetic concept of sublime, as Kant formulated from Burke, seems to overcome itself aesthetic, in that the Form stops fulfill major role in the experiment. It is then a transcendental and cognitive experience, in which the imagination in free play of faculties, builds a possible meaning and this activity reveals the dimension of human freedom.
The Sublime, Nature's Eloquent Gift
Eirene. Studia graeca et latina, 53, 2017, pp. 9-75., 2017
Discussing two recent books on the sublime (James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, and, in part, Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant), the review essay takes a closer look at the theoretical implications of, especially, Porter’s reading of Longinus. The main virtue of this reading is found to be twofold. First, avoiding the trap of a too narrow conceptualization of sublimity, it brings in an unusually broad range of texts that deal with sublime phaenomena from all the relevant points of view. Second, emphasizing the place of Longinus in the rhetorical tradition, it offers an archeology of the sublime’s fundamental relation to language. Demonstrating that no experience of sublimity is possible without speech that makes it articulate – and therefore shareable and teachable –, Porter enables us to rethink what Longinus has to say about nature, human nature, and art. The sublime emerges here as a unique yet variegated mental habitat where superhuman nature and the art of eloquence can connect and make us “see” what is incomparably greater than our shape and size that usually limit both our experience and the way we analyze it. The sublime reverses this experience and makes the universe bounce back on us by suddenly revealing its most distance vistas, but also its possible internal cracks and ruptures. Longinus himself does not theorize this situation as such: if he quotes and discusses a number of sources (Homer’s sublime mind looms large in his account), he is equally open to a form of Platonism and to those cosmic intervals or voids that originate with Lucretius whose theoretical stance is the most anti-Platonic imaginable. This is no contradiction: at the heart of the expressible sublime, there is a subtle and ongoing negotiation between what Porter labels the material and the immaterial sublime. If the former finds its expression in the poetics of the Presocratic authors and also in Lucretius, whereas the latter reaches its peak in various Platonic images of the soul’s ascent, neither kind of the sublime is a pure form and their difference is a matter of degree and scale. Regardless of theoretical orientation of different authors, the projection of their premises into the material universe leads the reader’s imagination towards the unachievable whole of reality as “sublime reality” (Porter). Compared to Porter’s enterprise, Doran’s book is less concerned with the rhetorical issues and focused on the sublime as a self-transcending psychological state that is more or less independent on the rhetoric of its expression. Instead, Doran’s sublime has a history that is intertwined with the culturally co-determined morality: especially the modern sublime thus shifts towards bourgeois rather than aristocratic values. The question is to know whether we find such a shift anticipated in the last chapter of Longinus’ treatise, which offers various views on the progressive disappearance of truly great and sublime natures. Longinus himself connects this process to the issue of political freedom and the world (imperial) peace, but leaves the matter of the true cause of the decline unresolved. Political progress or decline notwithstanding, to learn the appropriate rhetorical art of the sublime enables us to recover sublimity through the imitation or re-enactment that helps us to literally saturate our soul with the effluences of the great minds of the past.
The Aesthetic Category of the Sublime as a
The aesthetic category of the sublime, as expounded by Western discourse, is built upon the precultural experience of awe and the idea of greatness derived from that experience� Accordingly, it may be treated as a potentially universal category that comes in several cultural variants� The aim of this study is to present a methodology in which the material sublime is used to systematise and analyse a variety of literary techniques that constitute the persuasive force of Sanskrit grand narratives (itihāsas, purāṇas, and mahākāvyas)� The model of the material sublime described here is meant to be compared and supplemented with elements of Sanskrit literary theory�
The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime, ed. Cian Duffy, 2023
This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.
"Sublime," in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, 2020
What is the sublime? This entry defines the "sublime" and presents its historical context, focusing on its conceptual and philosophical aspects. The sublime denotes an intense, charged emotion with high arousal and containing a mixed valence (i.e. negative-to-positive). A sublime experience is an aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that is otherwise often experienced as menacing or overwhelming. Yet the experience is overall positive and pleasing. Second, this entry surveys several themes disputed in the literature: the sublime's relation to beauty, fear, and awe, why it is pleasing, and its being self-referential or reflexive. Third, the entry summarizes recent empirical research on the topic. The sublime has received relatively little scientific attention, only beginning in the past decade. A prominent empirical approach to the sublime conceptualizes it as having a fear component, although some recent studies have begun to question this. Finally, the entry concludes with a reflection on the sublime and the possible.