Sublime

The sublime as an aesthetic category has an extraordinarily discontinuous history in Western criticism and theory, though the phenomena it points to in art and nature are without historical limit, or virtually so. The sublime as a concept and phenomenon is harder to define than many aesthetic concepts, partly because of its content and partly because of the absence of a definition in the first great surviving text on the subject, Longinus’s On the Sublime. The sublime is inflected differently in the major theorists: in Longinus it produces ecstasy or transport in the reader or listener; in Burke its main ingredient is terror (but supplemented by infinity and obscurity); and in Kant’s bifurcated system of the mathematical and dynamic sublime, the former entails a cognitive overload, a breakdown of the imagination, and the ability to represent, whereas in the latter, the subject, after first being threatened, virtually, by powerful nature outside her or him, turns inward to discover a power of reason able to think beyond the realm of the senses. Many theorists testify to the effect of transcendence or exaltation of the self on the far side of a disturbing, disorienting experience that at least momentarily suspends or even annihilates the self. A great deal in the theoretical-critical texts turns on the force of singularly impressive examples, which may or may not exceed the designs of the theoretical axioms they are meant to exemplify. Examples of sublimity are by no means limited to nature and art but spill over into numerous domains of cultural and social life. The singular force of the individual examples, it is argued, nonetheless tends to work out similarly in certain genres conducive to the sublime (epic, tragedy) but somewhat differently from one genre to another. The heyday of the theory and critical engagement with the sublime lasts, in Western Europe and a little beyond, from the late 17th century to the early 19th century. But it does not simply go away, with sublime aesthetic production and critical reflection on the sublime present in the likes of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and—to Adorno’s mind—in the art of modernism generally, in its critical swerve from the canons of what had counted as beauty. The sublime flourished as a topic in theory of criticism of the poststructuralist era, in figures such as Lyotard and Paul de Man but also in Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism. The then current drive to critique the principle and some protocols of representation found an almost tailor-made topic in Enlightenment and Romantic theory of the sublime where, within philosophy, representation had been rendered problematic in robust fashion.

SACREDNESS IN SPEECH-MAKING OF MAKSYM RYLSKYI

The article is devoted to the analysis of linguistic means of sacrality as a style category, covering the solemnly elevated, traditionally established register of expressive linguistic means that hold the dominant values of the figurative book syntagms of religious style. Particular attention is paid to the unveiling of the stylistic potential of biblical words and expressions in the early speech-making of Maksym Rylskyi. The linguistic mechanisms of sacrality as a means of creating linguistic color, solemn, sublime, aesthetic perfection, positively-valued sounding of a poetic word are revealed. Performing stylistic, compositional, pragmatic functions in the artistic text, the sacral units are expressions of the individual-authorial reception of the values. Traditional artistic means of expressing sacrality in Maksym Rylskyi’s language are biblical words and phraseologisms, which are included in the registers not only of dictionaries of biblical words and expressions, but also of common phraseological and interpretative dictionaries dominant in the figurative book syntagms of the religious style and at the same time the expression of the gravity of the spiritual memory of the nation. In poetic contexts biblical words and expressions often acquire a metaphorical, lyrical sound, attesting to the sacral desemantization of lexemes, but instead actualizing implicit linguistic semantics.

Met het hoofd in de Cloud. Het digitale sublieme in de Vlaamse en Nederlandse roman

The ever-increasing availability of information, made possible by the Internet today, transforms the way people perceive and acquire knowledge. The following contribution maps the effects of this epistemological shift in the literary form of the novel, hypothesizing that the notion of the sublime helps us understand how literary fiction dramatizes this shift. The sublime aesthetic, which attempts to present the unpresentable, reflects the way the unfathomable scope of the Internet challenges the imagination. My narrative analysis draws on key concepts from cyberculture and media theory, such as virtuality, and links them to narrative categories such as setting, character and narration. In that way, my research will improve our understanding of how Dutch and Flemish literary fiction reflects upon the Internet and how the genre of the novel may change because of it.

La introducción del liberalismo inglés en Barcelona: "Lo bello y lo sublime", de Manuel Casamada

Resumen A principios del siglo xixlos literatos de la capital de España estaban divididos en dos facciones: una progresista y otra conservadora. Estas posiciones ideológicas contaminaron la literatura. Los progresistas utilizaron como bandera un texto retórico del predicador escocés Hugo Blair (1718-1800); los conservadores, un texto del esteta francés Charles Batteux (1713-1780). El uso de Blair representó también una vía más de introducción del pensamiento liberal inglés y la divulgación de Edmund Burke, de especial interés para la oposición entre lo bello y lo sublime. Hasta ese momento, los conceptos de lo bello y lo sublime se entendían como conceptos encadenados. En Barcelona, la influencia de Blair se ve en la obra del fraile liberal Manuel Casamada (1772-1841) y en el discurso, inédito, que pronunció en la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona (1837), que ha sido incluido, transcrito y anotado, en este artículo. Palabras clave: Hugo Blair, Manuel Casamada, bello, sublime, estética Abstract In early nineteenth century, the writers of the capital of Spain were divided into two factions: one conservative and one progressive. These ideological positions were transferred to literature. The progressives used as flag a rhetorical text of the Scottish preacher Hugh Blair (1718-1800), the conservatives, a text of the French esthete Charles Batteux (1713-1780). Blair’s use represents one route of introduction of liberal English thought and the popularization of Edmund Burke, work of particular interest to the opposition between the beautiful and the sublime. Until then, the concepts of beauty and the sublime understood as linked concepts. In Catalonia, Blair's influence is seen in the work of the Liberal priest Manuel Casamada (1772-1841) and in the speech, unedited, who spoke at the Real Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona(1837), which has been included, transcribed and annotated, in this article. Key words: Hugh Blair, Manuel Casamada, beautiful, sublime, aesthetic