On the Sublime

But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

Wordsworth, “Ode, Intimations of Immortality” (1807)

“The Sublime” is perhaps most familiarly known as troping the transcendental in Romantic poetry. But its figurations have been many and varied. In this course, we will trace this philosophical idea to its literary expression as an aesthetics of fear, of horror, of transcendence, of plenitude, of creative mind, of soul, of moral exaltation, of traumatic rupture and the radical renegotiation of self. Although deeply vested as a literary figure or trope, the sublime--itself a category of “excess”-- spills out into discussions of the political, the historical, the social and the psychological. Moreover, the term itself is split between a “natural” and “mathematical” sublime, both of which will figure in our discussions. Contingent, then, upon this study of the literature of the sublime will be its reconfiguration in contemporary critical theory as, variously, a crisis of representation or the shattering of forms of knowledge (the epistemological); temporal and spatial disruption raised to a metaphysics of place and person; a deeply gendered and problematic poetics of male desire; a psychological structuring of the traumatic encounter with the Other; an aethestic “imperialism” problematic in its politics; a simultaneity of drug-induced euphoria and the metaphysical; or a recuperative gesture in a poetics of memory which finally makes of the transcendental something paradoxically discrete, literal and private.

We will look first at sources for the sublime in classical literature (Longinus); then to its more recent formulations for modern aesthetics in Kant and Burke; then to a full exfoliation in English Romantic poetry and prose in Wordsworth, Percy and Mary Shelley. We will also want to consider the problem of art in the tension historically inhabiting the relation between the notion of art as “mastery” (“irony”, “wit” in 18th c. terminology; “self-consciousness” in the 20th) and the experiential and dynamic “formlessness” predicated in theories of the sublime. In the latter part of the course, I want to suggest as well that the sublime might survive in a “naturalized”, albeit etiolated, form as a poetics of memory in Proust and Woolf, and that in these later, however attenuated, versions of the sublime are seeded crucial “traces” or “remains” of this once-dominant figure of thought. Finally, we will engage current contemporary notions of a “postmodern sublime” in cyberpunk and other distopic science fictions.

Texts
Longinus, “On the Sublime”
Burke, from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
and the Beautiful; and from The French Revolution
Kant, from the First Book, “Analytic of the Beautiful,” from the Second Book “Analytic
of the Sublime” in the Critique of Judgement
Schlegel, from Critical Fragments; from Athenaeum Fragments; and from “On
Incomprehensibility”
Wordsworth “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”; “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”; The Prelude, Books I, II,
VI, XII, XIV
Thomas De Quincy, “Confessions of an Opium Eater”
Percy Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”; “To a Skylark”; Mont Blanc”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Proust, selections from Remembrance of Time Past [handout]
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner and other films

Critical readings from Longinus, Burke, Freud, Wieskal, Hertz, Lyotard, Blanchot, and Baudrillard.
Requirements: thoughtful and sustained participation in the seminar; two short essays, and a seminar project will result in a scholarly essay of 10-15. One of the shorter essays can be fulfilled instead by a creative response to the subject, i.e., photography, painting, music, creative fiction or non-fiction, etc.

Enrollment is limited to 15