|
Further Readings on the Sublime
 = pivotal works in the history of sublime theoryThe Canonical Works
- Longinus, Peri Hypsous (1st century A.D.)
- Nicolas Boileau, Oeuvres divereses du Sieur D*** avec Le traite de sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours, trad. du grec de Longin (Paris, Denis Thierry, 1678) [orig. pub. 1674]
- Joseph Addison, "Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination," in The Spectator, No. 412 (June 23, 1712) [search for "412" on the Web page]
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame, 1968) [orig. pub. 1757]
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790) [See also Friedrich Schiller, "Of the Sublime - Toward the Further Elaboration of Some Kantian Ideas" (1793)]
Selected Older 20th-Century Works
- Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935)
- Walter John Hipple, Jr., The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957)
- Albert O. Wlecke, Wordsworth and the Sublime (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973)
- Stuart A. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976)
- Karl Kroeber, "Romantic Historicism: The Temporal Sublime," in Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, ed. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978)
Selected Recent Works
- Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976)
- Neil Hertz, "The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime," in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985)
- Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)
- Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992)
- Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985)
- Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, ed., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- Jean-François Lyotard, "What is Postmodernism?" in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984)
- Jean-François Lyotard, "The Interest of the Sublime," in Jean-François Courtine, et. al., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993) (originally published as Du Sublime [Paris: Editions Belin, 1988])
 |
|
Section 7 from Peri Hypsous
We must realize, dear friend, that as in our everyday life nothing is really great which it is a mark of greatness to despise, I mean, for instance, wealth, position, reputation, sovereignty, and all the other things which possess a deal of theatrical attraction, and yet to a wise man would not seem supremely good, since contempt for them is itself eminently good–certainly men feel less admiration for those who have these things than for those who could have them but are big enough to slight them–well, so it is with the grand style in poetry and prose. We must consider whether some of these passages have merely some such outward show of grandeur with a rich moulding of casual accretions, and whether, if all this is peeled off, they may not turn out to be empty bombast which it is more noble to despise than to admire? For the true sublime, by some virtue of its nature, elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud possession, we are filled with joyful pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard. If, then, a man of sense, well-versed in literature, after hearing a passage several times finds that it does not affect him with a sense of sublimity, and does not leave behind in his mind more food for thought than the mere words at first suggest, but rather that on careful consideration it sinks in his esteem, then it cannot really be the true sublime, if its effect does not outlast the moment of utterance. For what is truly great gives abundant food for thought: it is irksome, nay, impossible, to resist its effect: the memory of it is stubborn and indelible. To speak generally, you should consider that to be truly beautiful and sublime which pleases all people at all times. For when men who differ in their habits, their lives, their tastes, their ages, their dates, all agree together in holding one and the same view about the same writing, then the unanimous verdict, as it were, of such discordant judges makes our faith in the admired passage strong and indisputable.
|
|
 |
|
