Sublime

“Usher”: the narrator comes from the outside world (the pre-sublime, the normal); he encounters the house, its inhabitants, and its environs (the moment of trauma); he dwells briefly in the house (which,asan objectification of Roderick’s disordered mind, embodies the sublime moment itself); then returns to the outside world (the recovery). What Poe has altered in his rendi- tion of the experience is not the form or structure of sublime experience but its character, reversing anticipated…

The Romantic era captured people and landscapes that were more remote in time and place. This is all done through various writing techniques. The Sublime, a motif in the Romantic Movement, can be observed time and time…

Bach’s Fantasia in F Sharp Minor and the 18th Century Sublime This is going to be an essay about how CPE Bach’s Fantasia in F Sharp Minor could relate to some of the 18th century ideas of the sublime. In the eighteenth century, there were a lot of differing ideas as to what, exactly, the sublime entailed. I shall mostly be concerning myself with those of Edmund Burke, as written in “A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful”, though many of the other…

in which Burke’s idea of the Sublime emerges in the Castle of Otranto According to Edmund Burke, the sublime is the most intense feeling we are capable of feeling. It is both pain and pleasure drove by complete astonishment. In The origins of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, Burke states that “the passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment” (53). In literature, authors use the sublime through their plots,…

Human beings for as long as it could be recorded have basked in ideas that are able to produce inspiring and fearful and overall consuming emotions. The sense of fear and awe that descends upon us when in the face of daunting events or inventions has become less and less mystical and more of a routine due to desensitization. Inventions we consider essential and routine such as the radio or television caused an uprising when first introduced to the public in the 1900’s. For Americans living in…

something as beautiful or sublime we feel some emotions. The emotions we feel by when we see beautiful objects are those of love, pleasure and liking whereas the emotions we feel when we see something sublime are of power, fear and astonishment. (Murray, 2013) In the romantic era people used to present their thoughts in their work. Burke presented his thoughts of the beautiful and the sublime in his book 'A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful'.…

for the poets to express their emotions through the medium of nature. In William Wordsworth’s My Heart Leaps Up and The World is Too Much With Us, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Mont Blanc, through the notions of man & the natural world, time, and the sublime, the romantics as worshippers of nature is explicitly depicted. It is through the various…

Kant argued that all cannot account for our experience of beauty itself, as the tendency is always to see ‘beauty’ as if it were somehow in the object or the immediate experience of the object. He also argued that such a relativist view cannot account for the social ‘behavior’ of our clams about what we find beautiful. Kant introduced the idea of ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties (understanding and imagination) to explore the implications of ‘apart from a concept’. He then related the…

experience and its concept (eg. death, envy, love, fame). Here the aesthetic idea is not presenting a particular rational idea but rather a general function of reason: the striving for a maximum, a totality or the end of a series (as in the mathematical sublime). In either case, the aesthetic idea is not merely a presentation, but one which will set the imagination and understanding into a harmony, creating the same kind of self-sustaining and self-contained feeling of pleasure as the…

“Nature is the national past, the basis of the national identity, an infinite source of moral regeneration, and guarantee of the democratic constitution,” (Opie 199). The picturesque and sublime aesthetic approaches to landscapes became foundational in American culture. America in its entirety is a melting pot, the culmination of other cultures into one country. However, Europeans were among the first to develop and colonize North America. Consequently, many European artists, poets, writers, and…