Sublime Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This research aims to examine which of the "Sublime" concepts described by Edmund Burke in A philosophical inquiry into an origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, published in 1757, can help in the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat, published in 1843. The analysis of the human passions performed by Burke in his book shows their effects for pain or pleasure, and the concept of "Sublime" characterizes the passions caused by pain. Since Poe presents many different philosophical questions in his tale, this research wants to investigate which are they and show how Burke's concept of "Sublime" may be observed in it. The horror described by Poe in the tale's sequence of events has numerous features of Burke's concept. The tale begins with the narrator, imprisoned and feeling close to death, telling about the series of strange domestic events. At this moment, everything that has happened to him, is felt as horror-although to some, it seems only grotesque. In this state, he loses his intelligence and says that only someone who has sanity can understand these events. The narrator asks himself throughout the tale where do the perverseness come from and whether it is innate to man, because, in the beginning, he loved his cat, Pluto. The cat's intelligence is said to be scary to his wife's eyes and, in addition, the narrator refers to him several times in the story as a huge feline, "remarkably large and beautiful", aspects related to the sublime. During the story, he starts to feel something scary about his cat, which makes him start to commit atrocities against it. After that, he questions himself about his sanity. The narrator's excessive perverseness and the strange and obscure side of the cat, resemble the sources of the "Sublime" as described by Burke. In this tale, there are a lot of sources of "Sublime". This research wants to find them and show their effect. The philosophical questions presented in Poe's tale indicate, therefore, a fictional narrative focused on the ambiguities and paradoxes of passions. In the same direction, Edmund Burke, in the previous century, examined in his work the most important human passions. This research is looking for connections between Poe's fantastic tale and the aesthetic concept of "Sublime", with a thorough focus on the analysis of the colors, sounds, personalities, architecture, and general characteristics used by Poe, which can be sources of the "Sublime". Thus, this research analyses the relations between philosophy and literature. The concept of Sublime in Edmund Burke and Poe's tale The Black Cat. Esse trabalho se insere na área de Estética e na linha de pesquisa que examina as relações entre filosofia e literatura; nessa direção, ele visa analisar os aspectos do conceito de Sublime de Edmund Burke (1729-1797) que poderiam operar na interpretação do conto de Poe (1809-1849).