(DOWNLOAD) "Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept (Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept (Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 99 KB
Description
The main premise of the present study is that the sublime, or sublimity, is not a structural quality in any artefact, specific arrangement of words, or refined selection of poetic diction; on the contrary, it is an extra-textual framing strategy, a set of values superimposed by consciousness in its attempt to compare unknown configurations and localize the unknowability of certain types of experience. As such the sublime is not an intrinsic value of the artwork; and in that respect Immanuel Kant's conclusion that "sublimity is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to nature outside us" (Kant, Critique of Judgement 147) is the beginning and probably the end of this discussion. Being a mental category, the sublime is not of the order of the transcendental qualities of space and time; it is a historically defined category of experiencing and interpreting objective realities which arises in the mind when conceptual paradigms collide with each other in periods of extreme cultural transition and re-orientation. During such historical periods of transition, an existing order of things and values is gradually undermined, dislocated, and transformed by different forms of perception and diverse patterns of ordering experience. The form that transition takes as representation is one of a simultaneous juxtapositions of contradictory opposites, which seem irreconcilable and pointing towards experiences of different order. The sublime then appears as the only form of representing experiences of antinomic nature, superimposing the absent on the present and the past experience on the immediacy of intense "newness." Thus, the sublime emerges when taxonomies collide and their collision leads to perceptual neutralization; the experience is immediate and deep as perception but the conceptual framework remains semantically inert in a state of exegetical aphonia. The sublime as rhetoric emerged in specific moments in intellectual and literary history, especially when there were deep tensions within an established system of evaluating experience as a rival worldview attempted to question and appropriate its legitimacy. Its ambiguity therefore can be located in the instability it entails or encodes and furthermore in its very historicity. The historical moment of "sublime" artworks indicates intense conflict of meaning, interpretation, and exegesis. So the sublime is always ambiguous since it encapsulates a moment in history when the present dominant perception is confronted with its own limitations, creating thus a cluster of meanings which can be interpreted in multiple ways. This could also lead to semantic nihilism or relativism which means that the artwork is then considered as dehistorized and abstracted from its conditions of production. But sublimity transcends this by establishing an implied hierarchy of significations: sublimity indicates a process of gradual ascent from simplicity to complexity, from singularity to plurality, and finally from a universe of individual experience to a pluriverse of totalizing experiences.
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