Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton PDF Author: David Louis Sedley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115280
Category : Skepticism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Boldly investigates the relationship between the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton PDF Author: David Louis Sedley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115280
Category : Skepticism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Boldly investigates the relationship between the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem

Sublimity

Sublimity PDF Author: James Kirwan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135455686
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Sublimity addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself, and the function that experience has played, and continues to play, within aesthetic discourse. The book both updates and revises existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, examines its neglected role in the nineteenth century aesthetics, and analyzes the significance of the modifications the concept has undergone in order to serve the interests of contemporary aesthetics. The book thus offers the most comprehensive coverage of the history of the sublime available.

American Technological Sublime

American Technological Sublime PDF Author: David E. Nye
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262640343
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.

The Sublime

The Sublime PDF Author: Philip Shaw
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415268479
Category : Sublime, The
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Usually related to feelings of overwhelming grandeur, irresistible power, lofty emotion or simple awe, the sublime is a term impossible to define. If it has any definition, it is that which exceeds description. In exploring this complex yet crucial concept, Philip Shaw looks in turn at: - the legacy of classical theories of the sublime - Edmund Burke's and Immanuel Kant's eighteenth-century contributions to debates around the term - romantic notions of sublimity - the postmodern and avant-garde sublime - politicisation of the concept by contemporary critical theorists. A remarkably clear study of what is in its essence a term near-impossible to pin down, this guide is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory.

The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant

The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant PDF Author: Robert Doran
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107101530
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime from Longinus to Kant.

The Sublime

The Sublime PDF Author: Andrew Ashfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521395823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of many of the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions.

Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century

Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Thomas Matthew Vozar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198875967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton's sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics. Such a narrative, however, fails to account for the fact that Milton is one of the first writers in English to refer to Longinus, the author traditionally associated with the Ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. This book argues that Milton did have an idea of the sublime—one that came to him from Longinus but also from a larger classical tradition that offered a pre-aesthetic predecessor to the aesthetic concept of the sublime. Thomas Vozar shows that Longinus was better known in early modern England than has been previously appreciated; that various notions of sublimity beyond that of Longinus would have been available to Milton and his contemporaries; and that such notions of the sublime were integral to Milton's rhetorical, scientific, and theological imagination. Additional material relating to the early modern reception of Longinus is provided in the appendices, which contain the first bibliographical study of copies of Longinus in English private libraries to 1674 and an edition of a newly discovered seventeenth-century English translation of Longinus. Far from being anachronistic, Milton's "abstracted sublimities" touch on almost every aspect of his thought, from rhetoric to politics, from science to theology. Making substantive contributions to literary scholarship, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century returns the sublime to its proper place at the forefront of Milton criticism, re-evaluates the diffusion of Longinian texts and concepts in early modern Europe, and records a crucial missing chapter in the history of the sublime.

English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime

English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime PDF Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110855332X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon.

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime PDF Author: Gavin Keeney
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447343
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 2: The Anti-capitalist Sublime takes up where Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book 1: Radical Scholarship (2015) left off, foremost in terms of a critique of neo-liberal academia and its demotion of the book in favor of various mediatic practices that substitute, arguably, for the one form of critical inquiry that might safeguard speculative intellectual inquiry as long-form and long-term project, especially in relationship to the archive or library (otherwise known as the "public domain"). This ongoing critique of neo-liberal academia is a necessary corrective to processes underway today toward the further marginalization of radical critique, with many of the traditional forms of sustained analysis being replaced by pseudo-empirical studies that abandon themes only presentable in the Arts and Humanities through the "arcanian closure" that the book as long-form inquisition represents (whether as novel, non-fictional critique, or something in-between). As a tomb for thought, this privileging of the shadowy recesses of the book preserves, through the very apparatuses of long- and slow-form scholarship, the premises presented here as indicative of an anti-capitalist project embedded in works that might otherwise shun such a characterization. The perverse capitalist capture of knowledge through mass digitalization is - paradoxically - the negative corollary for the reduction by abstraction of everyday works to a philosophical and moral inquest against Capital. The latter actually constitutes a transversal reduction for works (across works) toward the age-old antithesis to instrumentalized socio-cultural production - Spirit. For similar reasons, the anti-capitalist sublime as presented here is primarily a product of the imaginative, magical-realist regimes of thought in service to "no capital" - to no capitalization of thought. This book seeks to re-establish paradigmatic, a-historical, and universalizing practices in humanistic scholarship associated with speculative inquiry as a form of art, utilizing in passing forms of art and exemplary paradigmatic practices that are also first-order forms of speculative inquiry - suggesting that first-order works in the Arts and Humanities are those works that may "suffer" second-order incorporations without the attendant loss of the impress of sublimity (Spirit).

Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern

Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern PDF Author: William Slocombe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135489289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.