Search results for ""sublime""

This is the first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been excluded. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines, from art criticism and literary theory, to gender and cultural studies and environmental philosophy. The anthology includes brief introductions to each selection, reading or discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index – making it an ideal text for building a course around or for further study. The book’s apparatus provides valuable context for exploring the history and contemporary views of the sublime.

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In the past ten years, theorists from Elaine Scarry to Roger Scruton have devoted renewed attention to the aesthetic of beauty. Part of their discussions claim that beauty - because it arises from a sense of proportion, symmetry, or reciprocity - provides a model for justice. "Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime" makes a significant departure from this mode of thinking. Mark Canuel argues that the emphasis on beauty unwittingly reinforces, in the name of justice, the constraints of uniformity and conventionality. He calls for a more flexible and inclusive connection between aesthetics and justice, one founded on the Kantian concept of the sublime. The sublime captures the roles that asymmetry, complaint, and disagreement play in a complete understanding of a just society - a point, the author maintains, that was appreciated by a number of Romantic writers, including Mary Shelley. Canuel draws interesting connections between the debate about beauty and justice and issues in cosmopolitanism, queer theory, and animal studies.

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"These poems come right up to the reader, go through his pockets, check the seams and hems of his personality, his essence, his baggage, amiably but determinedly shaking him down.""A very lyrical poet." Remco Ekkers.Introduction by Jeffrey Wainwright.Translated by Willem Groenewgen.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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In the eighteenth century the Alps became the subject of a new view of nature, which crystallized in the sublime. Oscillating between fear and fascination, this sensual experience triggered a thrilling borderline experience: travelers ventured to the mountain world full of longing and projected a variety of different dreams onto the "wild nature" that had yet to be explored. To what extent has the sublime influenced architecture in the Alps, from the early days of tourism to the present? Prompted by this question, the author analyzes Alpine architecture in its historical context and offers a critical assessment of contemporary tourism. This is a book that inspires us to reflect on the future of building in the Alps and on our relationship with nature.

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The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence is the account of a young woman's stay in the psychiatric ward of a large hospital. The only time she feels safe is when swimming; the only place, the sea, preferably underwater. Selima Hill's 17th book of poetry - her 14th from Bloodaxe - takes her back to the territory of her third book, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1983), but this revisiting is quite different in style and mood. Over thirty years later, 'this brilliant lyricist of human darkness' (Fiona Sampson) is more able to chart and illuminate 'extreme experience with a dazzling excess' (Deryn Rees-Jones), with startling humour and surprising combinations of homely and outlandish. Shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize.

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Natural scenery–whether mountain peaks against a crystal blue sky, shimmering expanses of ocean or desert, or the perfection of a moss-laden path–affects us deeply, by turns eliciting joy, peace, awe, and a state of grace. Sublime Nature collects images that inspire these emotions, culled from the archives of the world’s leading photographers. Award-winning photojournalist and conservationist Cristina Mittermeier adds context, offering readers a visceral connection to the natural universe. Filled with breathtaking images, Sublime Nature captures our special relationship with nature in all its incarnations, inspiring us to protect its future.

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This book acts as a bridge between the topics of energy and water. It is an artfully crafted visual ode which imagines and reflects upon the intricate bond between the people who count on dams for energy and water, and the source that fuels this bounty. It is a tribute to the engineering feat so grand that it made Switzerland an energy hub in demand, providing the life-sustaining flow that drives our modern world. Candid and curious, this publication focuses on two things: the appearance and significance of the dam and power plant, and the appreciation of the structure as an impressive manifestation of civilization and culture in harmony with the spectacular nature and surroundings. With interviews and breathtaking photographs, this book delves into the history of the valley region and includes memories and opinions of those involved. Expert insights broaden the context and consider Emosson as an example of an intact symbiosis of nature and culture, and provide a glimpse of what is to come.

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A play about joy and heartbreak, quarries and transmat beams. When Oli arrives at now-forgotten sci-fi icon Marianne's door, he's looking for an autograph – and maybe a friend. Marianne's hoping for the phone to ring, for her best friend to see her differently, for her turn at something more substantial than a half-remembered role on a cult TV show. As they start to explore each other's worlds, they begin to discover what every good relationship needs: time and space. Exploring the complexities of connection, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, and the contrast in lived experiences across generations, Dark Sublime is a love-letter to British sci-fi television – those that make it and those that adore it. Michael Dennis's debut play premiered at Trafalgar Studios in London's West End in 2019, directed by Andrew Keates and starring Marina Sirtis, best known for appearing in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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"Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art." These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Poussin was the artist to whom Marin returned most faithfully over the years. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. At the center of Marins inquiry into Poussins art are the theory and practice of "reading" paintings. Rather than explicate Poussins work through systematic textual and iconographic analysis, he sets out to explore a cluster of speculative questions about the meaning of pictorial art: Can painting be a discourse? If so, how can that discourse be deciphered? Marins horizon for interpreting Poussin depends more on the concepts of aesthetic philosophy and the insights of cultural history than on an account of the painters career or his relationship with his artistic predecessors. For example, he positions several of Poussins best-known landscapes with respect both to French seventeenth-century debates on the question of the sublime and to the philosophical tradition of reflection on the sublime. Among the topics Marin studies are the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussins work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussins use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. The Poussin who emerges in these essays is preeminently a philosopher-artist whose painterly discourse embodies the limits of thought and of representation.

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Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zizek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the "source" of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that "God" takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English.

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Stephen Zepke shows how the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere and the recent Speculative Realism movement.

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In The Political Sublime Michael J. Shapiro formulates an original politics of aesthetics through an analysis of the experience of the sublime. Turning away from Kant's analysis of the sublime experience as a validation of the existence of a universal common sense, Shapiro draws on Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière to show how incomprehensible events and dilemmas provide openings for new political formations. He approaches the sublime through a range of artistic and cultural texts that address social crises and natural disasters, from the writing of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to the films of Ingmar Bergman and Spike Lee; these works suggest ways to channel the disruptive effects of the sublime into resistance to authority and innovative political initiative. Whether stemming from the threat of nuclear annihilation or the aftermath of an earthquake, the violence of racism and terrorism or the devastation of industrialism, sublime experience, Shapiro contends, allows for a rethinking of events in ways that reveal, redistribute, and create conditions of possibility for alternative communities of sense.

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2016 Foreword Reviews Indies Award, Silver 2016 Association for Mormon Letters Award 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold This introspective and exuberant collection of Patrick Madden’s essays is wide-ranging and wild, following bifurcating paths of thought to surprising connections. In Sublime Physick, Madden seeks what is common and ennobling among seemingly disparate, even divisive, subjects, ruminating on midlife, time, family, forgiveness, loss, originality, a Canadian rock band, and much more, discerning the ways in which the natural world (fisica) transcends and joins the realm of ideas (sublime) through the application of a meditative mind. In twelve essays that straddle the classical and the contemporary, Madden transmutes the ruder world into a finer one, articulating with subtle humor and playfulness how science and experience abut and intersect with spirituality and everyday life.

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Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes (the possibility of) historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth.

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2016 Foreword Reviews Indies Award, Silver 2016 Association for Mormon Letters Award 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold This introspective and exuberant collection of Patrick Madden’s essays is wide-ranging and wild, following bifurcating paths of thought to surprising connections. In Sublime Physick, Madden seeks what is common and ennobling among seemingly disparate, even divisive, subjects, ruminating on midlife, time, family, forgiveness, loss, originality, a Canadian rock band, and much more, discerning the ways in which the natural world (fisica) transcends and joins the realm of ideas (sublime) through the application of a meditative mind. In twelve essays that straddle the classical and the contemporary, Madden transmutes the ruder world into a finer one, articulating with subtle humor and playfulness how science and experience abut and intersect with spirituality and everyday life.

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Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes (the possibility of) historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth.

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Ruby Jane Galbraith is empty. Her family has been torn apart and it's all her fault. The only thing that makes sense to her is Fox - a gentle new friend who is wise, soulful and clever, yet oddly naive about the ways of the world. He understands what she's going through and he offers her a chance to find peace. Fox belongs to a group called the Institute of the Boundless Sublime - and Ruby can't stay away from him. So she is also drawn into what she discovers is a terrifying, secretive community that is far from the ideal world she expected. Can Ruby find the courage to escape? Is there any way she can save Fox too? And is there ever an escape from the far-reaching influence of the Institute of the Boundless Sublime? A gripping YA novel about an ordinary girl who is seduced into a modern-day cult.

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In The Political Sublime Michael J. Shapiro formulates an original politics of aesthetics through an analysis of the experience of the sublime. Turning away from Kant's analysis of the sublime experience as a validation of the existence of a universal common sense, Shapiro draws on Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière to show how incomprehensible events and dilemmas provide openings for new political formations. He approaches the sublime through a range of artistic and cultural texts that address social crises and natural disasters, from the writing of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to the films of Ingmar Bergman and Spike Lee; these works suggest ways to channel the disruptive effects of the sublime into resistance to authority and innovative political initiative. Whether stemming from the threat of nuclear annihilation or the aftermath of an earthquake, the violence of racism and terrorism or the devastation of industrialism, sublime experience, Shapiro contends, allows for a rethinking of events in ways that reveal, redistribute, and create conditions of possibility for alternative communities of sense.

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Cigarettes are bad for you; that is why they are so good. With its origins in the author’s urgent desire to stop smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime offers a provocative look at the literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking. Richard Klein focuses on the dark beauty, negative pleasures, and exacting benefits attached to tobacco use and to cigarettes in particular. His appreciation of paradox and playful use of hyperbole lead the way on this aptly ambivalent romp through the cigarette in war, movies (the "Humphrey Bogart cigarette"), literature, poetry, and the reflections of Sartre to show that cigarettes are a mixed blessing, precisely sublime.

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When originally published in 1960, this was the first complete English translation since 1799 of Kant's early work on aesthetics. More literary than philosophical, Observations shows Kant as a man of feeling rather than the dry thinker he often seemed to readers of the three Critiques.

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Maurice Broomfield (1916-2010) was a humanist photographer of the heroic and sublime - and sometimes surreal - qualities of industry and manufacture. His work spans the rise of post war industrial Britain in the 1950s to its slow decline into the early 1980s. Through his perfectionism, skill and sheer delight in the possibilities of photography, he produced an invaluable record of Britain's manufacturing past that is packed with artistry and high drama. 'My father always wanted to be called Maurice not Dad, so Maurice it is...' Industrial Sublime is introduced by Maurice's son, filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who this year released the documentary My Father and Me, which explores his relationship with Maurice. V&A curator Martin Barnes discusses the life and work of Maurice, whom he came to know well as he worked to transfer his archive from his Hampshire home to the Museum. He also analyses in more detail a selection of the most important images, many of which are accompanied by memories related by Maurice as he revisited his work. Together they form a monument not just to the might of British manufacturing, but to the dedication, skill and experience of those who worked in it.

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In The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante’s Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas’s darkly funny, surreal adaptation. Discovered snoozing on a mountainside above Lake Rotoiti, Mr Gallas – our millennial Dante – is taken under the wing by his Horatian guide, one Samuel Beckett. Over the course of 147 `songs’ we accompany the pair on their journey through the Bad Place, the Better Place and the Good Place, and witness the horrors and delights that befall the dead. On our way we encounter a skiing Pohutukawa Tree, a Golden Kiwi, Lineout the dog, a Vegetable Ewe, souls falling off things, Philosophy, and lots of bright, coloured lights. Divine order is replaced by modern Physics, by Klein bottles, super-speeds and black holes. Gallas’s Comedy is a metaphysical plunge through torment and triumph, as subtly satirical as it is unsubtly silly.

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During the Renaissance, the most renowned model of epic poetry was Virgil’s Aeneid, a poem promoting an influential concept of heroism based on the commitment to one’s nation and gods. However, Longinus’ theory of the sublime – newly recovered during the Renaissance – contradicted this absolute devotion to nation as a marker of religious piety. Heroic Awe explores how Renaissance epic poetry used the sublime to challenge the assumption that epic heroism was primarily about civic duty and glorification of state. The book demonstrates how the significant investment of Renaissance epic poetry in Longinus’ theory of the sublime reshaped the genre of epic. To do so, Kelly Lehtonen examines the intersection between the Longinian sublime and early modern Protestant and Catholic discourses in Renaissance poems such as the Gerusalemme Liberata, Les Semaines, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. In illuminating the role of Longinus along with that of religious discourses, Heroic Awe offers a new perspective on epic heroism in Renaissance epic poetry, redefining heroism as the capacity to be overwhelmed emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually by encounters with divine glory. In considering the links between religion, the sublime, and epic, the book aims to shed new light on several core topics in early modern studies, including epic heroism, Renaissance philosophy, theories of emotion, and the psychology of religion.

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Pindar—the ‘Theban eagle’, as Thomas Gray famously called him—has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar’s greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar’s odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar’s odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar’s astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet’s persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar’s views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

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