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ENGL 382B	Debora Sherman
F 1:30 - 4	HUIII

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.

"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 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. 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 difficult poetics of male desire; a psychological structuring of the traumatic encounter with the Other; an aesthetic "imperialism" problematic in its politics; a recuperative gesture in a poetics of memory which finally makes of the transcendental something discrete, literal and private.

We will look first at sources for the sublime in the classical tradition (Longinus); then to its more recent formulations for modern aesthetics in Kant and Burke; then to its full exfoliation in English Romantic poetry and prose in Blake, Wordsworth and the two Shelleys. 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 Ruskin and Proust, and that in these later, however attenuated, versions of the sublime are seeded crucial "traces" or "remains" of this dominant figure of thought.

Schedule of Readings:

Weeks 1 & 2 Longinus, "On the Sublime" (1st c. AD?)

Burke, from A philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759)

Kant, from the First Book, "Analytic of the Beautiful," from the Second Book "Analytic of the Sublime" in the Critique of Judgement (1790)

Cresap, "Sublime Politics: on the Uses of an Aesthetics of Terror" (1990)

Lyotard, from Lessons in the Analytic of the Sublime (1991)

Weeks 3, 4, 5 & 6 Poetry of Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley Lyotard,

"Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" (1979)

Anne K. Mellor, from Romanticism and Feminism (1988)

Weeks 7 & 8 Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980)

Weeks 9 & 10 Ruskin, Praeterita (1889)

Thomas Weiskel, from The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (1976)

Neil Hertz, from The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985)

Weeks 11, 12 & 13 Proust, Time Regained and excerpts from the other books from

Remembrance of Time Past (1909-22)

Heidegger, "What are Poets For?" (1950)

Benjamin, "The Image of Proust" (1929)

Requirements: thoughtful and sustained participation in the seminar; a seminar project that will run concurrently with the seminar and will result in a lengthy scholarly essay of 20-25 pages or a work of similar weight and consequence.