Charlotte Smith's Aesthetic System and the Borders of Romanticism

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-178
Author(s):  
Emilee Morrallis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Psychological Aspects ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The Sublime

Charlotte Smith's lengthy absence from popular culture has positioned her at the periphery of Romantic studies, yet the visual aspects of her prose exhibit a sustained engagement with Romantic ideals and aesthetic discourse, particularly the sublime. This article thus examines the experiences of Smith's marginalised heroines at physical borderlands in Ethelinde: or the Recluse of the Lake (1789) and Montalbert (1795) in relation to Edmund Burke's classifications of sublime and beautiful landscapes. Smith's protagonists demonstrate that small yet beautiful domestic spaces are places of reflection which provide sanctuary, whilst rugged sublime coastlines evoke extreme emotions and involve mental faculties such as the imagination. In Smith's work, there is an inherent connection between nature and selfhood which becomes the basis for an aesthetic system which expands upon Burkean terminology and constructs a framework for understanding the physical, emotional and psychological aspects of female interactions with the natural world.

scholarly journals The Logos between psychology, ontology, and Divinity: Fundamental aspects of the concept of Logos in the early thought of Slavoj Žižek

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Corneliu C. Simuț
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Psychological Aspects ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Fundamental Feature ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Thought

Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy spans over more than three decades, which is confirmed by the numerous books he published since the late 1980s. Since his thinking about the idea of logos is no exception, this article focuses on what can be termed Žižek’s early philosophy, and especially that depicted in his The sublime object of ideology (1989) and The metastases of enjoyment (1994). Whilst the former underlines the psychological aspects of the logos, the latter focuses more on theories about being, as well as on theological considerations. This is why, three uses of the logos were identified in Žižek’s thought: psychological, ontological and theological, all three with a clear focus on the human being as conceived in modern thought, which for Žižek seems to be utterly opposed to traditional thinking about man and his relationship with God. It is clear from Žižek that whilst the notion of God does appear in this thought, it only refers to the human being which encapsulates the essence of Žižek’s philosophy to the point that the logos itself is a fundamental feature of the human being’s material existence in the natural world. Regardless of whether the logos points to psychology, ontology or divinity (theology), it always emerges as an idea which centres on the human being, with a special interest in how it exists as well as how it works in the world.

Nature and the Sublime

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Mind

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.

scholarly journals Cartographic Sublime

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Hsu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
Rational Side

Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a super sensible faculty, over nature. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The concept of the sublime was associated with nature in late 18th and early 19th century aesthetics. Political philosopher and states-man Edmund Burke evoked human mortality in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, defining the sublime as experience of the overwhelming magnitude of phenomena in the natural world which causes “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions.” Kant, in contrast to Burke, defines rationality is an important component of the experience of the sublime: “The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.” That is, reason--super-added thought--allows us to comprehend and challenge the entirety of that which is beyond comprehension. He writes that “the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation . . . this feeling renders as it were intuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility.” For Kant, in other words, the experience of the sublime was the oscillation between sensation and rationality in the face of the overwhelming-ness of phenomena in the world.

The Kantian Sublime and Greatness of Mind

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Emily Brady
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Other Regarding

This chapter explores Kant’s discussion of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), in which the aesthetic subject becomes aware of a certain kind of greatness of mind. Kant’s scheme emphasizes respect for the moral capacities of the self as part of humanity, as well as admiration for greatness in the natural world. More broadly, his views show how ideas about greatness—if not magnanimity in the narrower sense—flow into philosophical approaches that lie beyond virtue ethics, moral thought, and human exceptionalism. The chapter argues that a comparative relation between self and sublime phenomena is central to understanding greatness of mind. Drawing out this comparative relation supports a deeper understanding of how both self-regarding and other-regarding attitudes feature within sublime experience, and just how this greatness might express itself within an aesthetic context.

The Scientific Sublime

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan G. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Crucial Difference ◽  
Stephen Jay Gould ◽  
Stephen Hawking

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?

Dynasties

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Heat Release ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Burgess Shale ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Tectonic Plates

Developing a methodology is everything in a science. Once you have it, you can go on to extract information, facts—a narrative—from the natural world. To human scientists and non-scientists alike, the use of fossils as evidence of past events on Earth is now taken for granted, is indeed ingrained into popular culture. Dinosaurs, for instance, stalk through our TV screens and cinemas and shopping malls, as virtual animations and plastic models and soft fluffy toys and comic book covers. An Age of Dinosaurs is widely accepted as a long-vanished era, a world lost within deep time. Our extraterrestrial investigators will, at some stage in their studies, be ready to try to recreate for themselves the eras of long-vanished animal and plant dynasties on this planet, to construct a coherent history out of the scattered relics preserved in the Earth’s abundant strata. By coming to understand the Earth’s marvellously regulated heat-release engine, that drives the tectonic plates, they will appreciate the continuous creation and preservation of strata. By getting to grips with the more subtle puzzle of how sea level has risen and fallen, they will have some idea of the finer controls on the preservation of the stratal record. And, as they grapple with these problems, they would undoubtedly try to put the strata themselves into some sort of order, just as did our Victorian and pre-Victorian predecessors. These pioneering geologists, after all, could recognize a prehistory when they saw one, even as they were still far from divining the workings of the Earth machine that lay at the heart of the story they were pursuing. What kind of strata will be available for study, one hundred million years from now? Many, if not all, of the classic fossil localities that we treasure today will have gone forever, eroded into scattered grains of sedimentary detritus that will ultimately accumulate on sea floors of the future. The Solnhofen Limestone of Germany, that yielded the archaeopteryx, will likely be gone. The Burgess Shale of British Columbia, with its wonderful array of early soft-bodied organisms from the Cambrian Period, half a billion years back, is almost certain to disappear, perched as it is high up a fast-eroding mountainside.

Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics, and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’sThe Hungry Tide

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana María Giles
Keyword(s):  
Mangrove Forest ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Postcolonial State ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Sundarban Mangrove ◽  
Ethics And Politics

AbstractSet in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre,The Hungry Tidetraces the transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics provides a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

scholarly journals Islamic Affinities with New Sciences and Technologies

ICR Journal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 184-185
Author(s):  
Eric Winkel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The West ◽  
Newtonian Physics ◽  
Technological Tools ◽  
Catch Up ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Lewis Mumford

Science and Technology (ST) understood as mechanical Newtonian physics and industry has indeed bypassed Muslim societies - and that’s a good thing. Because with the new ST Muslims can become full participants rather than passive recipients. From the 1960s and 1970s, a few Muslim thinkers sounded the alarm about ST (e.g., Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ismail Faruqi, and Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas). They were aware that Muslim societies were trying to catch up and join a system of knowledge and technological tools that were both ontologically opposed to Islam and harmful to Muslim cultures. At the same time, thinkers in the West were horrified at the implications of ST for the natural world and for human freedom (e.g., Theodore Roszak, Jerry Mander, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul). Today, from intellectual discourse to popular culture and movies, the idea that the old science and technology has gone wrong is easy to find and accept.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document