This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion.
The materials are not necessarily the
same as the instructor's teaching notes
and are not designed to represent a full
exposition or argument. This page is
subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
2/6/07
)
the "rhetorical
sublime" (p.
141) ("the grand style")
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)
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]
the
empirical sublime (pp.
49, 31)
the
psychological sublime (p. 36)
the
natural sublime (p.
53) [cf.,
Longinus, pp. 225-27]
Selected
Secondary Works
Samuel
Holt Monk, The
Sublime: A Study of Critical
Theories in XVIII-Century
England (New York:
MLA, 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)
Mountain Gloom and Mountain
Glory: The Development of the
Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959)
Thomas Burnet, Sacred
Theory of the Earth (first written
in Latin; trans. by the author into
English in 1684):
"These mountains are plac'd in no
Order one with another, that can
either respect Use or Beauty; and
if you consider them singly, they
do not consist of any Proportion
of Parts that is referable to any
Design, or that hath the least Footsteps
of Art or Counsel. There is nothing
in Nature more shapeless and ill-figur'd
than an old Rock or Mountain, and
all that Variety that is among them,
is but the many various Modes of
Irregularity. . . ."
Thomas Gray
Journal of his grand tour:
"you here meet with all the beauties
so savage and horrid a place can present
you with; Rocks of various and uncouth
figures, Cascades pouring down from
an immense height out of hanging Groves
of Pine-Trees, & the solemn Sound of
the Stream, that roars below, all concur
to form one of the most poetical scenes
imaginable. . . .
Not a precipice, not a torrent, not
a cliff, but is pregnant with religion
and poetry."
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)
"The
postmodern would be that
which, in the modern, puts
forward the unpresentable
in presentation itself;
that which denies itself
the solace of good forms,
the consensus of a taste
which would make it possible
to share collectively the
nostalgia for the unattainable;
that which searches for
new presentations, not
in order to enjoy them
but in order to impart
a stronger sense of the
unpresentable."
(p. 81)
See
also 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])
Selected
Secondary Works
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)
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)
Wordsworth
Two-Part
Prelude,
p. 2: Raven's Nest episode
Two-Part
Prelude, pp. 3-4,
Boat-Stealing episode
Two-Part
Prelude, p. 9,
Gibbet-Mast episode
Two-Part
Prelude, p. 10,
Blasted-Hawthorn episode
1805 Prelude, V: ll. 389
ff. (pp. 172-74), "There was a boy"
1805 Prelude, VI: Simplon
Pass
1805 Prelude, XIII: Snowdon
1805 Prelude, IV,
Discharged Soldier (pp. 144
ff. ll. 368-432)
Can There Be a
Modern Sublime?
Thomas Weiskel, pp. 25, xii, 3-4
Longinus Selections
from
Section 1,Peri Hypsous
Further, writing for a man of such learning
and culture as yourself, dear friend,
I almost feel freed from the need of
a lengthy preface showing how the Sublime
consists in a consummate excellence and
distinction of language, and that this
alone gave to the greatest poets and
historians their pre-eminence and clothed
them with immortal fame. For the effect
of genius is not to persuade the audience
but rather to transport them out of themselves.
Invariably what inspires wonder casts
a spell upon us and is always superior
to what is merely convincing and pleasing.
For our convictions are usually under
our own control, while such passages
exercise an irresistable power of mastery
and get the upper hand with every member
of the audience.
Again inventive skill and the
due disposal and marshalling of facts do not show themselves in one or two touches:
they gradually emerge from the whole tissue of the composition, while, on the
other hand, a well-timed flash of sublimity scatters everything before it like
a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke.
But, as I say, my dear Terentianus, these and other such hints you with your
experience could supply yourself.
Section 7,
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.
=
pivotal works