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The 1674 publication of Nicolas Boileau’s translation of the first-century treatise Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), by Cassius Longinus, marked the beginning of a modern fascination with the sublime as a category of aesthetic perception, and throughout the long eighteenth century, an extraordinary number of thinkers and writers made important contributions to the study of it as an affective experience – one in which the sensations of awe, terror, and pleasure were shown as the products of an encounter with one’s own death. By the end of the century, the sublime was a central aspect of Romantic aesthetics, indexing the grandeur of Romantic nature and the terror of the Gothic. Yet common to all experiences of the sublime is an encounter with a power that simultaneously exceeds and defines a self – one that has the sense of being annihilated but manages to emerge from the experience with a heightened awareness of one’s own importance in the world. This confrontation with an overwhelming power takes on extraordinary significance in an era of social and political upheaval, where the French Revolution signalled the onset of a new era of freedom and equality, but its succession by Robespierre’s Reign of Terror showed how easily revolution could devolve into further oppression, subjugation and violence, and where increasing agitation for the rights of the disenfranchised (workers, women, slaves, animals) drew attention not only to mechanisms of power and contestation, but similarly to codes of morality and ethics as mediating principles in the encounter with sublime power. This course examines a range of texts in various genres (essays, poetry, journals, and fiction) from the second half of the long eighteenth century all of which variously interrogate, articulate, or critique the aesthetics of the sublime in British Romanticism. Students will be asked to consider how the experience of the sublime destabilises and/or consolidates the perceiving subject, how it articulates forms of relationality, both ethical and political, how the dyadic structures of mind and body, self and other, reason and emotion, are negotiated, and to question why some writers considered the sublime the most important experience one could have, and why others were intensely critical of its power dynamics and the kind of subjectivity it produced.
Set Texts
Students are required to purchase a copy of the following text:
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, 1818 edition. Penguin Classics.
A course reader will be made available on Moodle prior to the beginning of semester. |
