The Ancient Sublime(s). A Review of The Sublime in Antiquity (original) (raw)
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2020: The Ancient Sublime(s). A Review of J.I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity
‘The Ancient Sublime(s). A Review of The Sublime in Antiquity’, Mnemosyne 73 (2020), 149-163 [review article]., 2020
The sublime plays an important role in recent publications on Greek and Latin literature. On the one hand, scholars try to make sense of ancient Greek theories of the sublime, both in Longinus' On the Sublime and in other rhetorical texts. On the other hand, the sublime, in its ancient and modern manifestations presented by thinkers from Longinus to Burke, Kant and Lyotard, has proved to be a productive tool for interpreting the works of Latin poets like Lucretius, Lucan and Seneca. But what is the sublime? And how does the Greek rhetorical sublime in Longinus relate to the Roman literary sublime in Lucretius and other poets? This article reviews James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity: it evaluates Porter's innovative approach to the ancient sublime, and considers the ways in which it might change our understanding of an important, but somewhat enigmatic concept.
Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023
Longinus introduced sublimity as a type of eminence or excellence of discourse, especially in literature and oratory. In ancient times, poetry was believed to be the finest product of art and this can be traced in the writings of great Greek thinkers like Aristotle, Plato and Longinus. Longinus advocates for the assimilation of certain qualities which, together, produces sublime feelings or expressions. It should be noted that there is distinction between grandeur and sublimity; grandeur produces amazement and wonder, but sublimity encompasses a combination of wonder and an ability to transport the mind with an irresistible power. Longinus declares that Sublimity, if produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power as a single blow. This paper will try to investigate different stages of the ‘sublime’ as a style in poetry within the rhetorical tradition of the ancient Greco-Roman world, its core nature, and the way it operates to build the soul of a lofty art product. It will also try to re-understand Longinus’s theory of sublimity, its importance and relevance.
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 Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Recipient of the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society of Classical Studies, 2017. Citation: "James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity is a critical tour-de-force and at the same time a rich and open-ended source-book that will delight readers interested in how the Greeks and Romans described and analyzed the experience of being struck, captivated, even overwhelmed by an act of hearing, viewing, or reading – an experience surely familiar to all lovers of Classical literature and art. The notion of “the sublime” and of a special category of awe-inspiring, transcendent and almost inexpressible greatness, whether encountered in the natural world (mountains, oceans, storms, a divine presence…) or in various forms of artistic production, has been a key element in Western aesthetics at least since the 18th century. Critics such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel have been followed by innumerable philosophers and historians of aesthetics, almost all of whom have traced the origin of this notion back to the unknown author (traditionally referred to as “Longinus”) who composed a remarkable rhetorical treatise entitled Peri Hypsous (or in Latin, De Sublimitate), some time between ca. 50 and 300 CE. Longinus’ treatise is thus almost universally regarded as constituting a major break-through in aesthetic thought that really stands alone in Classical antiquity. (M. H. Abrams, for example, in The Mirror and the Lamp, famously zeroed-in on the contrast between “Classical” poetics, as represented by Aristotle and the mainstream, and “Romantic” sensibilities, as adumbrated by Longinus.) James Porter, in his immensely erudite and wide-ranging new book, overturns this standardized history of criticism and offers a new and fascinating account of the multiple ways in which “sublime, wonderful, stupendous” experiences and compositions were recognized and described by a wide range of authors before and after Longinus – from Homer and Pindar, to Empedocles and Lucretius, and even such drily analytical critics as Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Porter’s extensively documented study, exploring numerous poetical and philosophical passages in close detail, makes it clear that Longinus’ treatise in fact comes in the middle, not at the beginning, of such discussions, distinguished more by its style and choice of particular examples than by its conceptual originality. As Porter observes, “The sublime pervades much of antiquity; it has simply been hiding in the light.” Porter’s book is not simply a negative achievement, however, in its re-positioning of Longinus within literary and aesthetic history. Along with its stimulating and important argument about the “tradition of the sublime” as a concept and an affective experience, the book provides a wonderful assemblage of particular close readings and analyses of individual texts, making new connections both within antiquity itself and between ancient and modern authors. Porter explores such stylistic strategies and dichotomies as simplicity vs variety, the power of the kairos and of ekplêxis, and the “logic of excess,” showing how all of these techniques involve an “art of the emotions” in which, as both rhetoricians and philosophers implicitly agreed, artistic skill and organizational power, whether human or divine, lie at the heart of the sublime effect. This book will immediately become required reading for anyone seriously studying ancient stylistics, rhetorical theory, and the history of aesthetics."
Costelloe, Timothy M., ed. The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 13 + 304 pp ISBN 978-0-521-14367-7; Eck, Caroline van, Stijn Bussels,MaartenDelbeke, Ju¨ rgen Pieters, eds. Translations of the Sublime: The EarlyModern Recep- tion and Dissemination of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre. Leiden: Brill, 2012. xix + 272 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-22955-6
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.
Beyond the limits: Longinus'On the sublime
2021
Despite its place in the history of Rhetoric, the treatise On the Sublime seems to move away from a school of rhetoric as an art of persuasion based on learningoriented rules and precepts. Although Longinus is part of the rhetorical tradition of his time, in his view, which has nothing to do with stylistics, the sublime is not definable through the formal language of rhetoric because it goes beyond the limits of that art. The treatise presents what we may call an aesthetics of the unlimited and the impossible, evident in the examples of sublime moments in literary texts given by the author .