Shiny Things: Reflective Surfaces and Their Mixed Meanings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Diepeveen ◽  
Timothy van Laar
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime ◽  
Reflective Surfaces ◽  
The Way

Discusses meanings of shininess in art and in culture generally. Shininess is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of concepts such as utopia, the sublime, and camp; and the way its affects, rooted in excess produce irony, anxiety, pleasure and kitsch. A compelling subject that instantly attracts and fascinates.

scholarly journals A Phenomenological Investigation of the Presencing of Space

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Francisco Mata
Keyword(s):  
Built Environments ◽  
Spatial Experience ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Distinctive Type ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
The Way

In this paper the author explores certain fulfilling personal experiences that he describes as the presencing of space, i.e. the way in which an individual’s spatial involvement may put him or her in contact with reality as a whole. These experiences are investigated from a phenomenological perspective, and the differences between them and other similar experiences, such as that of the sublime or topophilia, are highlighted. A neologism is introduced: topoaletheia (from the Greek topos, space understood as region, and aletheia, disclosure) to name a distinctive type of spatial experience. This concept may enrich the discussion about our involvement with space in our built environments.  

For Those Who Disagree – Rancière and the Sublime

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 202-240
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Philosophy Department ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
The One ◽  
Negative Sense ◽  
The Way

The work of Jacques Rancière is concerned with the sublime, but in a negative sense. He hates it. And as well, he hates the way thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard (and in fact them in particular, his colleagues in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII) have constructed both an aesthetics and an ethics from it. And as well, how this sublime aesthetics draws upon a politics (which is also an ontology) of otherness. In fact, he is even going to accuse Derrida of this, although without roilling him up with the problems of the sublime. So Rancière is going to be very useful to us as a critical reflection on those who have gone before, but as well he will because he is the one who speaks most about contemporary art. But his place here is not entirely negative, despite his constant and methodological disagreements. Rancière also offers an aesthetics based upon Kant’s Third Critique, but one that begins from the beautiful rather than the sublime. This will be a useful addition to the aesthetics we have already examined that emerge from Kant’s work, and another possible way to understand its political possibilities.

scholarly journals Teletrauma

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Fogarasi
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Intermediate Position ◽  
Specific Question ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Simple Notion ◽  
Aesthetic Distance ◽  
The Way

This paper seeks to trace the notion of distance in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, by first indicating how the critical distance between Burke and Kant can be rethought in terms of an intrapersonal distance within both; then, as a second move, by looking at Burke’s general theory of the passions as it differs from that of Locke; and thirdly, by moving to the more specific question of how the passion of fear or terror is related to both pain and the sublime – an investigation which in turn necessitates a focus on the way attention figures as a duplicitous shifter between an-aesthesis and suffering. Interestingly enough, while Burke conceptualizes the sublime as a passion based on mediation or distance, and therefore distinguishes it from “simple” fear, later it turns out that fear itself is far from being a “simple” notion for immediacy, since immediate danger or threat still presupposes a mere apprehension of pain, rather than pure pain itself. This double distance (between fear and the sublime, as well as between fear and pain), puts fear in an intermediate position, which is more traumatic than that of the sublime, but which contains an element of distance with relation to pain, and is therefore a form of “teletrauma,” an amalgam of an-aesthesis and suffering. Being thus positioned between the sublime and pain, fear appears as the site of contamination, where detachment and involvement merge. In this respect, it may serve as a conceptual tool for a critical rethinking of the problematic nature of both aesthetic distance and perceptual immediacy.

Sublime, the

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Crowther
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Self Transcendence ◽  
The Way

The origin of the term ‘the sublime’ is found in ancient philosophy, where, for example, Longinus linked it with a lofty and elevated use of literary language. In the eighteenth century, the term came into much broader use, when it was applied not only to literature but also to the experience of nature, whereafter it became one of the most hotly debated subjects in the cultural discourse of that age. The theories of Addison, Burke and Kant are especially significant. Addison developed and extended the Longinian view of the sublime as a mode of elevated self-transcendence, while Burke extended John Dennis’s insight concerning sublimity’s connection with terror and a sense of self-preservation. While Addison and Burke encompassed both art and nature in their approaches, Kant confined the experience of the sublime to our encounters with nature. In his theory, the sublime is defined as a pleasure in the way that nature’s capacity to overwhelm our powers of perception and imagination is contained by and serves to vivify our powers of rational comprehension. It is a distinctive aesthetic experience. In the 1980s and 1990s Kant’s and (to a much lesser extent) Burke’s theories of the sublime became the objects of a massive revival of interest, in the immediate context of a more general discussion of postmodern society. Kant’s theory, for example, has been used by J.-F. Lyotard and others to explain the sensibility – orientated towards the enjoyment of complexity, rapid change and a breakdown of categories – that seems to characterize that society.

Robert Schumann, Serious Virtuosity, and the Rhetoric of the Sublime

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-482
Author(s):  
Alexander Stefaniak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Choral Works ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Aesthetic Values ◽  
The Way

In several essays from the first half of the nineteenth century, Robert Schumann and other music critics used the rhetoric of the sublime when describing select, unconventionally intense virtuosic showpieces and performances, evoking this category’s associations with overpowering, even fearsome experiences and heroic human qualities. These writings formed one strand of a larger discourse in which musicians and critics attempted to describe and identify instances of virtuosity that supposedly rejected superficiality and aimed at serious aesthetic values: in the nineteenth-century imagination, the sublime abnegated mere sensuous pleasure; inspired a mixture of attraction, admiration, and trepidation; and implied both masculinity and intellectual cultivation. It offered a framework for self-consciously elevating virtuosity rooted in the sheer intensity and, in some cases, perceived inaccessibility of particular works and performances. Schumann extended the mantle of sublimity to Liszt during the virtuoso’s 1840 Leipzig and Dresden concerts. Critics described three of Schumann’s own 1830s piano showpieces using the rhetoric of the sublime, comparing the finale of the Concert sans orchestre, Op. 14, to violent forces of nature to illustrate the way its virtuosic passagework disrupts and engulfs lyrical themes within an anomalous formal structure. They also linked the Toccata, Op. 7, and Etudes symphoniques, Op. 13, to Beethoven, hinting at the ways in which Schumann alluded to or modeled these showpieces on Beethoven symphonies. These episodes in Schumann’s career broaden our understanding of the contexts in which nineteenth-century writers on music evoked the sublime, showing how they described this quality not only in symphonies and large choral works but also in solo performances and showpieces. They illuminate the politics of the sublime, revealing its significance for nineteenth-century thinking about the cultural prestige that particular musical works and performances could attain.

Burke's Theory Concerning Words, Images, and Emotion

PMLA ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dixon Wecter
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime ◽  
Abstract Ideas ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Edmund Burke's youthful essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757, sets forth a theory that the impassioned language of poetry and oratory may rouse emotion without the entry of any clear images into the mind. This proposal—audacious if read by the light of the Augustan sunset, but prophetic of romanticism—has received occasional notice from historians of criticism because it anticipates Lessing's brilliant attack upon Wortmalerei in Laokoon (1766). But the way in which Burke seems to have invented his theory from scraps of Locke and Berkeley, left on the battlefield where the contest over abstract ideas had once been waged, has gone apparently unnoticed.

scholarly journals The Sublime

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-85
Author(s):  
Karzan A. Mahmood
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper aims at analysing the concept of the sublime, which is a pioneering concept of the English Romantics poetry, in relation to the French revolution in the works of Edmund Burke. Burke, unlike all other thinkers who view sublimity as a delightful and elevating feeling, perceives sublimity as an element of dangerous and terrifying incidents and objects mainly in relation with the great incident of the French Revolution. Hence, the paper concentrates on that essential metamorphosis in the content of the concept from progression to regression in the concept of sublime. Burke himself witnessed the revolution in France and propounded his philosophical viewpoints revolving around the notion of the sublime. He contended that the sublimity is whatsoever that brings about terror or is what terrifies the subjects. From this, he concluded that the French revolution was sublime because it was dangerous and threatened the natural laws and order, religion and God’s genuine sublime, traditions and constitution. In this paper, in addition, his ideas to illustrate sublime will ultimately, to some degree, be evaluated and criticised. The second part will be dedicated to demonstrating the aesthetics nature and aspect of the concept of the sublime. While the third part will display the relation of the concept, the way it is exhibited in chapter two, in relation to the great revolution in France.

The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-113
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Logical Conclusion ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Way

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his arabesque vegetality travels into the work of later writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Poe’s foregrounding of the eighteenth-century notion of “the sentience of all vegetable things” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) both responds to and undermines Romantic ideas about human affinities with plants. In “Usher,” Poe follows the Enlightenment analogy of human to plant to its logical conclusion in order to expose its aporias; for him, vegetal sentience cannot be contained within any hierarchy of being. At the same time, Poe destroys the Romantic fusional model—in which humans and plants commune within a shared physical world—by focusing on the destructive and rapacious qualities of the vegetal. The transcendental ideas of beauty and the sublime give way in Poe to a vegetality that invades the human consciousness. He suggests that humans might be horrified, rather than delighted, by the calamity that a vegetal modernity represents, even though (and perhaps because) they have no alternative to it.

Beckett's Sublime Ironies: The , , and the Remainders of Romanticism

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-129
Author(s):  
Andrew Eastham
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Irony ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Way

This essay theorizes the status of Romantic irony in Beckett's work according to its relationship with the sublime, which takes three different forms. First, in the "German Letter," irony is conceived of as the way to the sublime. I argue that a diagnostic account of this process emerges in , where Romantic irony is framed as the symptom of a moribund condition. Finally, I suggest that in Beckett works to ironize the rhetoric of Romanticism, whilst the Romantic irony of his narrators is constituted by an aspiration to repeat an irrecoverable sublime encounter.

scholarly journals Can there be a negative aesthetic judgement on sublime?

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Igor Cvejic
Keyword(s):  
Positive Answer ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Aesthetic Judgement ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Content Object ◽  
The Way

When we talk about the aesthetic judgement in Kant, certainly the main example is the judgement of taste, that is, beautiful and ugly. However, in addition to the judgement of taste, Kant speaks of another kind of aesthetic reflexive judgments - sublime. The main question addressed in this paper is whether in the case of the sublime we can speak of a negative aesthetic judgment, a judgment of what would be contrary to the sublime in the way that the ugly is opposite to the beautiful. After considering the similarities and differences of the ugly and sublime and outlining the formal problems of thinking at all about the aesthetic judgment of what is contrary to sublime, we will try to give a positive answer. The content (object) argument will be considered first, then the argument based on the relation of faculties, which will prove to be insufficient. The closest solution will be to consider in the specific kind of ridiculous.

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