The Deliberative Sublime: Edmund Burke on Disruptive Speech and Imaginative Judgment

2017 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROB GOODMAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Rhetorical Practice

Is there a case to be made for the value, amidst relatively settled institutions, of unsettling speech—speech characterized by excess, impropriety, and even the uncanny? Much of contemporary deliberative theory would answer in the negative. This article, however, proposes that we can derive a defense of the deliberative value of immoderate speech from an unlikely source: Edmund Burke's theory and practice of the rhetorical sublime. Burke's account of the sublime was developed in response to an eighteenth-century discourse of civility that anticipated the anti-rhetorical strand of contemporary deliberative theory. By reconstructing Burke's response, we can recover a forceful defense of rhetoric in the present. For Burke, the disruptive practice of sublime speech can provoke circumstantial judgment, overcoming deliberators’ aversions to judging. Drawing on Burke's rhetorical practice alongside his aesthetic and linguistic theory, this article upholds a central role in deliberation for rhetoric, even in its unruly and excessive aspects.

scholarly journals Helen’s semiotic body: ancient and modern representations

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-213
Author(s):  
Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Physical Vacuum ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site

The paper draws on theoretical work on the representation of the female body as an object of the male gaze in modern narrative, in order to decode and analyze Helen’s portrayal as a physical vacuum in ancient literature. I argue that the negation of Helen’s corporeality emphasizes the semiotic duality of her body, allowing it to be deployed both as a sign and as a site for the inscription of signs. The paper, then, proceeds to show how Helen’s Iliadic depiction has provided the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke with a rhetorical platform upon which to theorize the aesthetic dichotomy between the beautiful and the sublime. I close my analysis by illustrating how the eclecticism, compromises, and pastiches that inform Helen’s cinematic recreations find a parallel in, and thus perpetuate, ancient pictorial techniques.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
James Uden
Keyword(s):  
Original Composition ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Edward Young

This chapter examines the dynamic and evolving relationship between conceptions of “Gothic” and “classical” in mid-eighteenth-century criticism. It argues that both terms were highly changeable in their content and were rarely imagined as mere opposites. The chapter focuses on three authors, all of whom reinterpreted the classical world as an object of private aesthetic experience rather than as a source of political or ethical examples. In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young imagines the Roman poets as a giant “spectre,” which threatened to overwhelm modern poets, inhibiting their capacity for original creation. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a frightening descent into the Underworld of Virgil’s Aeneid as an opportunity to form homosocial bonds with other male readers. Finally, Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) describes the classical world as a distant forerunner to a more modern preoccupation with enchantment and imagination. In all three of these authors, the classical world is shifting its meaning and significance. It is becoming, paradoxically, increasingly Gothic.

Mediating the Sublime

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikita Mathias
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Media ◽  
Easel Painting

As if accepting Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s rejection of the visual arts as carriers of the experience of the sublime as a productive challenge, artists and craftsmen already in the eighteenth century started to experiment with media technological innovations that would give more dynamic, greater and overwhelming images of sublime disaster events. More precisely, such innovations sought to overcome the spatial and temporal limitations of easel painting, aiming to provide experiences of illusionistic immersion and of sensory, affective, and emotional intensity. The media discussed in this chapter range from the moving images of the Eidophusikon and the Diorama to the large-scale pictures of the Panorama, John Martin’s disaster motifs, and American landscape painting. Moreover, these various media participated in broader popularization processes, as pictorial experiences shifted from being viewed as elite activities toward phenomena of middle class leisure entertainment.

The Sublime in Disaster Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikita Mathias
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
First Century ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Sublime

The film analytical chapter moves along the lines of different key moments of the sublime: the Sublime as somatic excess, subjectivity, transcendence, modality, presentability, the geological sublime, the sublime and the ridiculous, as well as sublime hyperobjects and the ecological sublime. The primary analytical tool applied are Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s theoretical models of the sublime. The application of these eighteenth-century theorems for the analysis of twentieth and twenty-first-century motion pictures is solely justified through their shared historical foundation. This historical account takes into view the broader cultural horizon of the sublime, encompassing aesthetic thought, art historical iconographies, media technologies, aesthetic receptive conventions and strategies, scientific, economic, and cultural discourses, as well as general concepts of man’s relation to nature’s forces.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT INFLUENCE: ASSESSING EDMUND BURKE'S CONSERVATIVE LEGACIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
CLAIRE RYDELL ARCENAS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Open Question ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Edmund Burke is difficult to classify. Born in Ireland in 1730, he entered parliament in 1765 having already achieved literary distinction for several philosophical works, including On the origins of the sublime and beautiful (1757). His subsequent career as a Whig statesman, politician, and reformer spanned the tumultuous decades of the late eighteenth century and culminated, less than a decade before his death, in his famous polemic against the French Revolution, Reflections on the revolution in France (1790). Over the course of his life, Burke opined with such frequency on so many topics that the nature of his ‘philosophy’ remains an open question, and scholars continue to offer strikingly different interpretations of his life and legacies. ‘Burke's legacy to history’, historian Richard Bourke summarized, ‘has been a complicated affair’.

Aristocracy about 1760: Theory and Practice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
The People ◽  
Important Sense

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.

‘Levelling the Sublime’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
English Prose ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Status

The eighteenth century saw the curious tradition of translating Milton’s Paradise Lost into normative English prose and verse. The status of these translations as literary curiosities belies their serious ambition: to secure a universal readership of this English classic, an ambition also articulated in contemporary works of criticism and commentaries. Rather than treating this cluster of works as adaptations, this chapter conceives of them as intralingual translations, thus positioning them in the terms with which their authors describe them and within the earlier tradition of translation-as-commentary. Milton’s English translators aim at making his epic accessible to women, ‘foreigners’, ‘young people’, and ‘those of a capacity and knowledge below the first class of learning’, even if that accessibility requires some rewriting. Borrowing methods from the teaching of Latin, these authors established a practice that persists to this day in student-friendly translations of English poetry.

THE “HARD FORM” OF SCULPTURE: MARBLE, MATTER AND SPIRIT IN EUROPEAN SCULPTURE FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT THROUGH ROMANTICISM

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA WALSH
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
External Appearance ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Familiar World ◽  
A Site ◽  
Aesthetic Values

The apparently distinct aesthetic values of naturalism (a fidelity to external appearance) and neoclassicism (with its focus on idealization and intangible essence) came together in creative tension and fusion in much late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century sculptural theory and practice. The hybrid styles that resulted suited the requirements of the European sculpture-buying public. Both aesthetics, however, created difficulties for the German Idealists who represented a particularly uncompromising strain of Romantic theory. In their view, naturalism was too closely bound to the observable, familiar world, while neoclassicism was too wedded to notions of clearly defined forms. This article explores sculptural practice and theory at this time as a site of complex debates around the medium's potential for specific concrete representation in a context of competing Romantic visions (ethereal, social and commercial) of modernity.

COMMUNICATING EMPIRE: THE HABSBURGS AND THEIR CRITICS, 1700–1919

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 117-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. W. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Power Base ◽  
The One ◽  
At Home

ABSTRACTIn the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undividedimperiumso long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

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