Sublime Essays

  • Understanding Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime

    1863 Words  | 4 Pages

    Romantic Sublime In order to understand Weiskel's argument on the sublime, it would be helpful to briefly review the influential treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Immanuel Kant and Edmund. Longinus understands the sublime as intrinsically related to linguistics, as being achieved mainly through language and literature. The "linguistic sublime" causes one to transcend oneself. When one perceives an experience as producing ecstasy, he asserts, that experience can be considered sublime. According

  • Burke’s Sublime In O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins

    1196 Words  | 3 Pages

    the Burkeian Sublime. According to Burke, the Sublime is an experience that comes from authority and power. A common example for the Burkeian Sublime is looking at the power of mountains. Mountains are Sublime because they’re large in size, and have the power to kill people. Therefore, through looking at Burke’s requirements for the Sublime the conclusion is made that Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins contains the Burkeian Sublime. One of the key aspects of the Burkeian Sublime is pure authority

  • Sublime Research Paper

    706 Words  | 2 Pages

    What is the Sublime in today’s society? In todays society we often use the word ‘Sublime’ in a colloquial manner. It seems to have been put into the category of words used to describe something better than just ‘good’: fantastic, amazing, magnificent, - sublime. The history of the sublime however does not indicate that the word was intended for such use; but in being a term that has a complex and rich history of development there is no wonder in todays society that the word is being used colloquially

  • The Sublime in Tintern Abbey

    3270 Words  | 7 Pages

    The Sublime in "Tintern Abbey" Lifting from Longinus, Burke, and Kant -- authors whose works Wordsworth would have read or known, perhaps indirectly, through Coleridge -- I want to look at how our reading of this nuanced term is necessarily problematic and difficult to pin down. Is the sublime a stylistic convention of visual representation? Is it a literary trope? Is it a verbal ruse? Or is the sublime a conceptual category defying, or at least interrogating the validity of verbal representation

  • Relationship between Sublime and Magical Realism Explored in The Monkey

    1429 Words  | 3 Pages

    Relationship between Sublime and Magical Realism Explored in The Monkey From the beginning of The Monkey, a short story located within Isak Dinesen's anthology Seven Gothic Tales, the reader is taken back to a “storytime” world he or she may remember from childhood. Dinesen's 1934 example of what has been identified as the "Gothic Sublime" sets the stage for analysis of its relationship to other types of literature. What constitutes Sublime literature? More importantly, how may sublime literature relate

  • Sublime Elements in Of Love and Other Demons

    920 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sublime Elements in Of Love and Other Demons The book Of Love and Other Demons (1994), written by the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has more characteristics of sublime literature than of magical realist literature. Magical Realism and the sublime are so closely related that distinguishing between the two is hard. They are more closely related than magical realism and the fantastic. Of Love and Other Demons has elements of magical realism. Of all the magical elements, the most important

  • Burke's Notion Of The Sublime

    1292 Words  | 3 Pages

    be associated with Edmund Burke's notion of the sublime, which for him, is the strongest emotion a human mind can feel, however, the film in various ways captures to celluloid many of his key precepts. Historically, the word sublime evokes images of terrible storms erupting in the distance or the frightening possibilities and chaotic power of a tornado tearing through the countryside. Words such as awe, terror, and danger coincide with the sublime in the minds of many since Burke's A Philosophical

  • Sublime Elements in Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

    1152 Words  | 3 Pages

    real in order to evoke emotions about love, but it also employs many features of sublime literature. In Like Water for Chocolate, a girl named Tita was born. When she was first born, it mentions that she was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor (6). This occurrence appears to be a magical element rather than the sublime. A baby cannot be washed into the world. Therefore, I feel that it is magical.

  • Kant's Essay 'The Sublime Is Now'

    2259 Words  | 5 Pages

    ‘Sublime’ is a word which defies definition in many ways. Originally derived from the latin ‘sublimis’ the fusion of ‘sub’ meaning ‘up to’ and then either ‘limus’ meaning ‘a boundary or limit’ [Morley, 2010] or others argue ‘limen’ meaning ‘the heavy wooden or stone beam that holds the weight of a wall up above a doorway or window.’ [Riding and Llewellyn, 2013] This sense of pushing upwards against an overbearing force or against a limit is an important connotation for the word sublime. [Riding and

  • Elements of Magical Realism and Sublime in Toad's Mouth

    1467 Words  | 3 Pages

    and Sublime in Toad's Mouth "Toad's Mouth" is a short story written by Isabel Allende in 1989. She has lived in Chili for most of her life, but she was born in Lima, Peru. Her father was a diplomat in Peru, but when her parents divorced, Allende's mother took her back to Santiago, Chili, to live with her grandparents. She wrote her first novel, The House of Spirits, around 1981. It became an international best seller. After reading "Toad's Mouth, I believe that magical realism and sublime literature

  • Is The Sublime In Terror More Real Than In Art?

    746 Words  | 2 Pages

    Thesis: Is the sublime in terror more real than in art? Chapter 1. At the beginning of this research it is prudent that we must define the term “sublime” both in a historical sense and by the terms of contemporary art. Historically the sublime theory is related to Burke, Kant, and Lyotard, and their writings. Refering to great philosophers of the 18th century and earlier, we must say that Edmund Burke at his book ”Α philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”

  • How Does Victor Use Power In Frankenstein

    1690 Words  | 4 Pages

    oneself for it provides meaning or substance to one’s internal being. Power allows a person to have control of his/her destiny; but without this spark of control one becomes lost in the sublime and unknown realities of life. In the novel Frankenstein, Victor defies the confinements of his restricted power and uses sublime nature as an extension of himself to regain control. With a "spark of electricity" he creates life from raw, uninhibited nature. Ironically, his desperate attempt to regain control through

  • Comparing Wordsworth And Coleridge

    1186 Words  | 3 Pages

    should seek to discover in nature, what a connection with nature truly means, and hence what nature ultimately represents. In Coleridge’s work, he suggests a moral and religious framework in which to place the forces of nature and the awe of the sublime; the idea that nature will never leave those that are ‘wise and pure’ suggests a degree of selectivity based on virtue and thus the power of nature in his poetry is subsumed, and superseded by, Coleridge’s personal Christian beliefs and thus the power

  • Knowledge and Imagination in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

    1370 Words  | 3 Pages

    Title “He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors”.(Thomas Jefferson).In Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, the theme of the sublime is featured throughout the text. It is seen in the use of knowledge, imagination, and solitariness which is the protagonist's primary source of power. This perpetuates their quest for glory, revenge, and what results in their own self-destruction and dehumanization. Ultimately, the final cause being irreversible harm

  • Longinus And Sublime

    636 Words  | 2 Pages

    important work is on the sublime; it is consist of 17 chapters talk about the effect of good writing and the figures of speech first published in 1554. Longinus takes a pragmatic position. His main question is what is good writing and how may it be achieved?. His answer to this question is that good writing is what he calls sublime – it is apart of the good. According to Longinus, sublime is a certain distinction and excellence in expression. Elevated language of the sublime aims to cast a spell over

  • The Gothic Sublime

    869 Words  | 2 Pages

    A great number of tales take up the description that Baker posits for the sublime, and the narrative usually includes something reminiscent of Baker’s description. The setting will often include or harken back to something that is undeniably engulfing in scope, or which at least produces a feeling of such when reading the text. Usually this will relate in some way to a place or object which has stood for aeons, at least in perception; alternatively it could also relate to something simply fantastically

  • Techno Sublime Essay

    2544 Words  | 6 Pages

    I began my inquiry into the "techno-sublime" by keying the term "techno-sublime" into Googe to see if the term had been coined before. Whilst there was no exact match, the first site that opened was http://www.sublime.net.au/chillout.html, 'The Chillout . clubbing is a planetary experience'. I had long been interested in the event of the techno-dance party, that total awesome experience where there is a collapse of individuality and a loss of individual boundaries as "I" become part of the collective

  • Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime

    3544 Words  | 8 Pages

    Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime ABSTRACT: In this essay I explicate J.F. Lyotard's reading of the Kantian sublime as presented in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994) and in "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism" (1984). Lessons articulates the context in which critical thought situates itself as a zone of virtually infinite creative capacity, undetermined by principles but in search of them; "Answering the Question" explores how the virtually infinite creative capacity of thought

  • Depictions of the Literary Sublime

    1146 Words  | 3 Pages

    nature, and the use of metaphors in descriptive passages. They use the sublime to express the grandeur of nature and to describe specific objects of nature. The writers also employ the sublime as a way to communicate their imagination and interpretations of nature to the readers. Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hopkins use the sublime in their literary works to interpret and express the aesthetics of nature. Wordsworth expresses the sublime beauty and forms of nature in “I wandered lonely as a cloud” by illustrating

  • CTW #2: On the Sublime

    921 Words  | 2 Pages

    In his book On the Sublime, Longinus rhetorically identifies five principal elements to the art of mastering sublimity, through the use of written texts. Longinus defines sublimity as, “a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse […] sublimity on the other hand, produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind and exhibits the orator’s power at a single blow” (Longinus 347). However, there is great jeopardy when writers seek to produce subliminal messages. Longinus describes the