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Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.
This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism - 'postmodern nihilism' - that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature in two chapters, the first on aesthetics and the second on ethics. It offers a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature.
Original Scholarly Monograph
From the Copernican revolution of Immanuel Kant to the cognitive mapping of Fredric Jameson to the postcolonial politics of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, representation has been posed as both indispensable and impossible. In his pathbreaking work, The Abyss of Representation, George Hartley traces the development of this impossible necessity from its German Idealist roots through Marxist theories of postmodernism, arguing that in this period of skepticism and globalization we are still grappling with issues brought forth during the age of romanticism and revolution. Hartley shows how the modern problem of representation—the inability of a figure to do justice to its object—still haunts today's postmodern philosophy and politics. He reveals the ways the sublime abyss that opened up in Idealist epistemology and aesthetics resurfaces in recent theories of ideology and subjectivity. Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism.
In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.
On Postmodenism
In the history of ideas, the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the grotesque have exerted a powerful force over the cultural imagination. Ambiguous Subjects is one of the first studies to examine the relationship between these concepts. Tracing the history of the sublime from the eighteenth century through Burke and Kant, Wawrzinek illustrates the ways in which the sublime has traditionally been privileged as an inherently masculine and imperialist mode of experience that polices and abjects the grotesque to the margins of acceptable discourse, and the way in which twentieth-century reconfigurations of the sublime increasingly enable the productive situating of these concepts within a dialogic relation as a means of instating an ethical relation to others. This book examines the articulations of both the sublime and the grotesque in three postmodern texts. Looking at novels by Nicole Brossard and Morgan Yasbincek, and the performance work of The Women’s Circus, Wawrzinek illuminates the ways in which these writers and performers restructure the spatial and temporal parameters of the sublime in order to allow various forms of highly contingent transcendence that always necessarily remain in relation to the grotesque body. Ambiguous Subjects illustrates how the sublime and the grotesque can co-exist in a manner where each depends on and is inflected through the other, thus enabling a notion of individuality and of community as contingent, but nevertheless very real, moments in time. Ambiguous Subjects is essential reading for anyone interested in aesthetics, continental philosophy, gender studies, literary theory, sociology and politics.
In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.
This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.
More than 130 years from Matthew Arnold.s pronouncement that human beings .must be compelled to relish the sublime., education in the humanities still relies on the ideal of culture as the means of intellectual development. In this distinctive and original work, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper explore the growing tensions and contradictions between this and the contemporary world of work, pleasure, and consumption. While critical of the hypocrisies and elitism that can attach to notions of cultural self-realisation, the authors nonetheless defend its overall educational and social value. Their wide-ranging discussion takes in critiques of philosophers from Kant and Schiller to Nietzsche and Marx, and includes historically contextualized readings of novels by Wollstonecraft, Hardy, Gissing, London, and Woolf.In their sustained defence of a conception of personal worth and self-fulfillment for its own sake, Ryle and Soper not only offer a powerful critique of the continuing dominance of work in contemporary society, but also provide a compelling alternative to the standard postmodern scepticism about the relevance of high culture.