The challenge of the sublime

The challenge of the sublime
Author: Hélène Ibata
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2018-02-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526117428

This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork.

The Possibility of the Sublime

The Possibility of the Sublime
Author: Jane Forsey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2018-04-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1527510301

The notion of the sublime, used to describe a particular kind of overwhelming or exhilarating aesthetic experience, has garnered a great deal of attention by philosophers, critical theorists and literary scholars. In the midst of this growing body of literature, Professor Jane Forsey published an article asking whether an aesthetic theory of the sublime is even possible, and argued provocatively in the negative. Claiming that efforts to explain the sublime inevitably result in theories that are either contradictory or incoherent, Forsey posed a challenge to anyone who takes the sublime seriously as an aesthetic category. This volume brings together an international slate of philosophers and scholars of the sublime, who have been invited to respond to, and critically engage with, Forsey’s article. Unlike other monographs and anthologies that deal broadly with the sublime in aesthetics, this collection examines specific conceptual problems with the very foundations of sublime theory in a manner that is tightly focused and rigorous. It represents a variety of approaches that defend the sublime, and concludes with an original response by Professor Forsey to her critics.

The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

The Sublime in Modern Philosophy
Author: Emily Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2013-08-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107276268

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

Beyond the Finite

Beyond the Finite
Author: Roald Hoffmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0199750564

Throughout its long history, and not just as the key aesthetic category for the Romantic Movement, the sublime has created the necessary link between aesthetic and moral judgment, offering the prospect of transcending the limits of measurement, even imagination. The best of science makes genuine claims to the sublime. For in science, as in art, every day brings the entirely new, the extreme, and the unrepresentable. How does one depict negative mass, for example, or the folding of a protein that is contagious? Can one capture emergent phenomena as they emerge? Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond. This book, through contributions from nine prominent scholars, tackles that challenge. The explorations within Beyond the Finite range from the images taken by the Hubble Telescope to David Bohm's quantum romanticism, from Kant and Burke to a "downward spiraling infinity" of the 21st century sublime, all lucid yet transcendent. Squarely positioned at the interface between science and art, this volume's chapters capture a remarkable variety of perspectives, with neuroscience, chemistry, astronomy, physics, film, painting and music discussed in relation to the sublime experience, topics surely to peak the interest of academics and students studying the sublime in various disciplines.

Visual Phenomenology

Visual Phenomenology
Author: Erika Goble
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1315459280

The Paradox of Sublimity

Sensibility and the Sublime

Sensibility and the Sublime
Author: David Weissman
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 311032038X

Philosophic attention shifted after Hegel from Kant’s emphasis on sensibility to criticism and analyses of the fine arts. The arts themselves seemed as ample as nature; a disciplined science could devote as much energy to one as the other. But then the arts began to splinter because of new technologies: photography displaced figurative painting; hearing recorded music reduced the interest in learning to play it. The firm interiority that Hegel assumed was undermined by the speed, mechanization, and distractions of modern life. We inherit two problems: restore quality and conviction in the arts; cultivate the interiority—the sensibility—that is a condition for judgment in every domain. What is sensibility’s role in experiences of every sort, but especially those provoked when art is made and enjoyed?

The Slave Sublime

The Slave Sublime
Author: Stacy J. Lettman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2022-05-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1469668092

In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era—namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery, Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory, this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation and slavery in the Caribbean.

A Theology of the Sublime

A Theology of the Sublime
Author: Clayton Crockett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2002-01-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1134550103

A Theology of the Sublime is the first major response to the influential and controversial Radical Orthodoxy movement. Clayton Crockett develops a constructive radical theology from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant - a philosophy attacked by Radical Orthodoxy - to show Kant's relevance to postmodern philosophy and contemporary theology.

The Challenge of the Sublime

The Challenge of the Sublime
Author: Hélène Pharabod-Ibata
Publisher: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018
Genre: Art, British
ISBN: 9781526117397

This interdisciplinary study looks at the influence of Edmund Burke's theories of the sublime on British Romantic art, arguing that it is far more significant than previously imagined.

The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom

The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom
Author: Robert R. Clewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2009-04-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0521516684

This book shows how certain crucial concepts in Kant's aesthetics and practical philosophy fit together and deepen our understanding of his thought.