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The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding (thus differing from the many scholars who use Hegel to dismiss Kant or vice versa). He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world. The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates.
This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.
Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume XXIV features four philosophical works by Irish statesman EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797): [ "On Taste," a 1756 consideration of critical reasoning [ "On the Sublime and Beautiful," a 1757 essay on aesthetics that would influence Immanuel Kant [ "Reflections on the French Revolution," a 1790 argument against that budding uprising, which continues to inform anticommunist and antisocialist debates [ "A Letter to a Noble Lord," a 1796 missive that is a classic political tirade
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.
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: Many authors would agree that Frankenstein is one of the most famous Gothic tales of all time. It was first published in 1818 and is famous for its descriptions of landscape and nature, as well as its prophetic dimension. More than 60 years before the novel was published, Edmund Burke set out to analyze the sublime. By doing so, he actually took an important step towards founding the genre Shelley engaged in, in writing Frankenstein. His A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime published in 1757 became a great success. This term paper sets out to shed light on a number of problem areas concerning the connection between Shelley’s novel and Burke’s theory of the sublime. The paper arose out of the Proseminar ‘Gothic Literatur’ by XY, M.A. in the Summer Semester 2011 at RWTH University Aachen. During the course, different topics concerning the Gothic novel were discussed in combination with four of the most famous novels belonging to the genre. Among them was Frankenstein as a novel and ‘Burke’s Theory of the Sublime and Its Reflection in the Gothic Fiction’ as a topic. The central question to be examined in this paper is how Burke’s theory of the sublime is reflected in Shelley‘s Gothic novel. Further questions to be dealt with in this term paper are: what is the Burkean sublime? What was new and different about Burke’s concept of the Sublime – as the Sublime itself is by no means a groundbreaking, new concept. Does Shelley intentionally incorporate sublime features in her novel or comment on the use of Burke’s theory? Is there a social dimension to Burke’s theory? In what way does the novel reflect the sublime? Is a sense of the sublime only conveyed through descriptions of nature? ... The first part of the term paper presents Burke’s theory of the sublime, an analysis of the connection between Shelley and the sublime and an analysis of the social dimension of the sublime. The next part is going to shed light on how Frankenstein as a Gothic novel reflects elements of Burke’s theory of the sublime. A fuller discussion including an analysis of all scenes displaying sublime elements would go beyond the range of the paper. In this matter only five scenes were chosen. Those scenes are significant for the plot development, as well as they help to support the line of argumentation. Eventually, a conclusion will be drawn.
In this provocative and original work, Slavoj _i_ek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author’s acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. _i_ek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a ‘post-ideological’ world ignores the fact that ‘even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them’. Rejecting postmodernism’s unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates. Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.