Mediating the Sublime

Author(s):  
Nikita Mathias

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.

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Elba Orfelia Domaccin Aros

La cultura de masas consigue fabricar a gran escala, con técnicas y procedimientos  industriales,  ideas,  sueños  e  ilusiones,  estilos  personales  y hasta una vida privada en gran parte producto de una técnica, subordinada a una rentabilidad y a la tensión permanente entre la creatividad y la estandarización,  apta  para  poder  ser  asimilada  por  el  ciudadano  de  clase media. En la actualidad, los medios de comunicación constituyen una herramienta persuasiva que nos permiten mantenernos en continua comunicación con los distintos sucesos sociales, políticos y económicos tanto a escala nacional como internacional. PALABRAS CLAVE: cultura de masas; medios de comunicación; creatividad; estandarización. ABSTRACT Mass culture manages to manufacture on a large scale, with industrial techniques and procedures, ideas, dreams and illusions, personal styles and even a private life largely the product of a technique, subordinated to a profitability and the permanent tension between creativity and Standardization, capable of being assimilated by the middle-class citizen. At present, the media is a persuasive tool that allows us to keep in constant communication with the different social, political and economic events, both nationally and internationally. KEYWORDS: mass culture; media; creativity; standardization.


Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Nikita Mathias

This article discusses the work and the reception of the artists Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) and John Martin (1789–1854), both in terms of their engagement with art as an academic discipline and in terms of their relationship to the emergent middle-class interest in the consumption of visual spectacle. A central concern in both respects was the aesthetic category of the sublime, which had been established around the mid-eighteenth century as the primary visual mode of experiencing the force and power of nature. De Loutherbourg successfully recreated sublime spectacles (for example, shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, waterfalls, avalanches) within academy painting and stage design. Later, he invented the Eidophusikon, a multimedia device that was designed to stage dynamic natural phenomena. The Eidophusikon is thought to have influenced London’s pictorial entertainment circle, which proved inspirational for John Martin around half a century later.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-213
Author(s):  
Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
James Uden

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.


Author(s):  
Nikita Mathias

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
CLAIRE RYDELL ARCENAS

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’.


2017 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROB GOODMAN

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.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This chapter follows the rise to power of the Shamsins, the Bayt al-Shillif, and associated ʻAlawi families as Ottoman tax concessionaries. It shows that their position of local autonomy, rather than having evolved out of some domestic or “tribal” leadership structure, resulted from a paradigm shift in Ottoman provincial administration as well as from a very favorable economic context, in particular the development of commercial tobacco farming in the northern highlands around Latakia. If the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a veritable Ottoman–ʻAlawi landed gentry, it also saw increasing social disparities lead to large-scale emigration away from the highlands toward the coastal and inland plains as well as toward the Hatay district of what is today southern Turkey.


Author(s):  
Olga V. Khavanova ◽  

The second half of the eighteenth century in the lands under the sceptre of the House of Austria was a period of development of a language policy addressing the ethno-linguistic diversity of the monarchy’s subjects. On the one hand, the sphere of use of the German language was becoming wider, embracing more and more segments of administration, education, and culture. On the other hand, the authorities were perfectly aware of the fact that communication in the languages and vernaculars of the nationalities living in the Austrian Monarchy was one of the principal instruments of spreading decrees and announcements from the central and local authorities to the less-educated strata of the population. Consequently, a large-scale reform of primary education was launched, aimed at making the whole population literate, regardless of social status, nationality (mother tongue), or confession. In parallel with the centrally coordinated state policy of education and language-use, subjects-both language experts and amateur polyglots-joined the process of writing grammar books, which were intended to ease communication between the different nationalities of the Habsburg lands. This article considers some examples of such editions with primary attention given to the correlation between private initiative and governmental policies, mechanisms of verifying the textbooks to be published, their content, and their potential readers. This paper demonstrates that for grammar-book authors, it was very important to be integrated into the patronage networks at the court and in administrative bodies and stresses that the Vienna court controlled the process of selection and financing of grammar books to be published depending on their quality and ability to satisfy the aims and goals of state policy.


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