ABSTRACT
Tom Hanauer's thoughtful discussion of my article “The Pleasures of Contra‐purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human” (2014) puts pressure on two important issues concerning the ...affective phenomenology of the sublime. My aim in that article was to present an analysis of the sublime that does not suffer from the problems identified by Jane Forsey in “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?” (2007). I argued that Kant's notion of reflective judgment can help with this task, because it allows us to capture the experience of failure that characterizes the sublime without committing us to ontologically transcendent items. In a significant departure from Kant, however, my account does not require references to our moral vocation to explain the pleasure we take in the sublime; the pleasure comes from getting the right measure of our agency. For Hanauer, trouble for my analysis comes both from the discursive presentation of the sublime, its focus on judgment, and from the removal of references to our moral vocation.
Empirical research indicates that beauty is in part a matter of prototype approximation. Some research suggests that unanticipated pattern recognition is important as well. This essay begins by ...briefly outlining an account of beauty based on these factors. It goes on to consider complications. Minor complications include the partial incompatibility of these accounts and the importance of differentiating judgments of beauty from aesthetic response. More serious issues include the relative neglect of literature in neurologically-based discussions of beauty, which tend to focus on music or visual art. There is also a relative neglect of emotion, beyond the reward system. Finally, there is the almost complete absence of the sublime. After considering these problems broadly, the essay turns to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, examining its treatment of beauty and sublimity. The aim of this section is not merely to illuminate Woolf's novel by reference to neuroscientific research. It is equally, perhaps more fully, to expand our neuroscientifically grounded account of aesthetic response by drawing on Woolf's novel. In Mrs. Dalloway, there are gestures toward prototypes and patterns in beauty. But the key features are clearly emotional. Specifically, the emotions at issue in feelings of beauty and sublimity appear to be primarily attachment, on the one hand, and a profound sense of isolation, on the other. Woolf's novel also points us toward other features of aesthetic experience, crucially including the emotion-sharing that is a key function of the production and circulation of art.
Mechanical Aesthetics Mackintosh, Will B
Pennsylvania history,
12/2014, Volume:
81, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In the 1830s, Pennsylvania's Main Line of Public Works was at the cutting edge of the transportation revolution. Travelers embraced the speed and convenience of the line, but struggled to articulate ...the aesthetic experience of new forms of travel. This article uses the narratives of John Alonzo Clark, a Philadelphia minister, to explore the ways in which Pennsylvania travelers applied existing categories of the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque to innovative technological experiences. Clark and travelers like him found that mechanized transportation on the Main Line of Public Works heightened their experience of the landscape and distilled the older categories to their essence. Far from perceiving a tension between modern technology and landscape appreciation, these travelers found that together the two created novel and pleasurable aesthetic experiences.
This article explores the malady mentioned in the title of Enrique Vila-Matas’s El mal de Montano (2002) by means of Neil Hertz’s study of the moment of blockage in Kant’s drama of the sublime. It ...aims to elucidate Vila-Matas’s conjoining of innovation and disappearance. Montano’s malady, it argues, derives from the belief that literature is too vast to allow writers to innovate, and that the narrator’s attempts to cure it are efforts to establish literature’s limits and thus master the totality of it. Yet such scenarios of sublime confrontation fail and thus show that they aimed to reassure a certain notion of authorship. The narrator, however, realizes that a writer does not need to surpass literature’s powers in order to innovate, and that conventional ideas of originality can be sacrificed. It is at such a point, and without abandoning the belief in literature’s sublime magnitude, that disappearance becomes his ultimate goal.
In the age of the Anthropocene, nature's wounds are seemingly impossible, if not ethically reprehensible, to ignore as news of the geologic agency requires one to recognize the detrimental impact ...one's pursuit of progress has had on a global scale. The convergence of human and natural history, the incommensurability of various scales of time, and the distribution of agency to human and nonhuman entities all point to the innumerable processes of temporal and material mediation that constitute the Anthropocene. For this reason, a historical materialist approach to the art that emerges out of this cognitive landscape is essential. Here, Nagelhout discusses the ways in which Theodore Adorno's aesthetic theory accommodates, and is innervated by the new geologic era.
In The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) Norris registers the paradoxical architecture of humanity in a distinctively modern fashion by drawing on the aesthetic tradition of the sublime. To fully ...capture the sense of failure and defeat that goes into the making of modern subjectivity, he turns the physical and intellectual collapse of his characters into a positively uplifting experience rooted in feelings of pleasure and awe. Norris’s protagonists are perplexed and overwhelmed by, but also fatally attracted to, the very force that threatens to destroy them. They turn the physical, emotional, and imaginative failure typifying the sublime into a major building block for the reproduction of the very logic of the brute force that overpowers them. They do so by establishing social hierarchies of dominance meant to control the market economy, class mobility, and gender relations in fin-de-siècle American society.
Longinus' On the Sublime (date unknown) presents itself as a response to the work of the Augustan critic Caecilius of Caleacte. Recent attempts to reconstruct Longinus' intellectual context have ...largely ignored the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Caecilius' contemporary colleague (active in Rome between 30 and 8 B.C.E.). This article investigates the concept of hupsos ("the sublime") and its religious aspects in Longinus and Dionysius, and reveals a remarkable continuity between the discourse of both authors. Dionysius' works inform us about an Augustan debate on Plato and the sublime, and thereby provide us with an important context for Longinus' treatise.
Is practical performance laboratory work feasible within an institutional academic setting? The possibilities for practice as research in contemporary academia is examined through an ongoing research ...project that focuses on the area between training and performance.
During his third expedition into the higher Himalaya in 1866, the most ambitious of his three journeys into the mountains, Samuel Bourne trekked to the Gangotri glacier, the source of the Ganges. At ...that site he took “two or three negatives of this holy and not altogether unpicturesque object,” the first photographs ever made of the glacier and the ice cave called Gomukh, meaning the cow's mouth, from which the river emerges (Bourne 96). These words of Victorian India's pre-eminent landscape photographer, importantly, highlight the coming together of the picturesque mode and the landscape form through the medium of photography. In this essay, I focus on Samuel Bourne's images of the Himalaya, produced between 1863 and 1870, to query the ideological power of this triangulation to produce a specific image of the mountains in late nineteenth-century Victorian India. Situating Bourne's images in relation to contemporaneous material practices of the British within the space of the Himalaya, namely, the establishment of hill stations as picturesque locales in the higher altitudes of the Indian subcontinent, I argue that the landscape form, the picturesque mode, and the photographic medium, inflect each other to tame the sublimity of the mountains by representing them as similar to the Alps.
PDF
