Sublime

energy to persuade Captain Robert Walton’s crew to complete their mission. Frankenstein’s speech contradicts his previous dangerously ambitious and irresponsible actions. His speech promotes heroics and sublimity, two major values of the Romantic poet. Reading Frankenstein as a criticism of the Romantic poets who surrounded Mary Shelley, Frankenstein is a failed Romantic who takes Shelley’s contemporaries’ ideals too far. Shelley highlights the hypocrisy of this failed Romantic through…

The reading for this week comes from William Cronon’s book Uncommon Ground. Throughout the passage, Cronon argues that our modern view of wilderness is paradoxically flawed, but due to the historical effects of the sublime and the frontier that emerged at the end of the 19th century, the adoration of wilderness has become ingrained in our culture. These ideologies have imprinted man-made moral values and cultural symbols on wilderness. Cronon asserts that this romanticism of nature currently…

artistic approaches. While they both portray the “nature”, their emotion and interpretation differ. Beauty comes from the level of our realization which can be understood. Sublime, however, is shaped by a formless and compelling force. Before analyzing the painting, The Great Day of Wrath, I was confused about the word “sublime” from “beauty”, but now I can distinguish the two. In a simple description, they give a different sensation. At first, I looked at the painting as a whole and thought,…

Although it is not a conventional monster, the Sublime is a good example of a mental monster, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (Of the Sublime Pg 49). The sublime shares many traits with conventional monster, it excites pain and terrible emotions. The sublime is a completely mental being, yet it…

Victor is attempting to flee from his problems by forgetting about them. He allows himself to be carried by the wind into the middle of the lake in order to help replicate his mental state. The nature surrounding Victor then slowly progresses to the sublime. Victor realizes that he cannot run from his problems and to cope with his anguish he leaves in search for some comfort. “Sometimes I could cope […] suddenly left my home […] Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such…

The philosophy of the Sublime and the Beautiful stems from philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke contrasts the two concepts, with the Sublime representing something that is of immense magnitude, or a character that causes admiration, terror, appearing determined – the embodiment of respect and submission. Matilda is a personification of the Sublime, as Ambrosio chastises her for plunging him into ‘an abyss of misery’ (p. 172) and continues…

minute in the quickly changing globalized world. In the way of James Joyce, he brings out epiphanies in common, quick surroundings which, using an articulation, uncover the internal life and get contributed with new implications. Both A Strange and Sublime Address and Afternoon Raag are rich in solidified minutes which demonstrate the connection between a character and his environment yet in addition build up the character's personality and render his/her experience interesting. This occurs amid…

Landscapes can embody values that have the power to prompt philosophical insight and a spiritual awakening in an individual experiencing a landscape. This notion is encapsulated in Alain de Botton’s non-fiction memoir, The Art of Travel (2002) and Sean Penn’s film ‘Into the Wild’ (2007). These texts collectively explore the philosophy of the relationship between people and landscapes and it’s potential power to nurture an intellectual and spiritual understanding of one’s self and the human…

due to Romanticism’s stylistic diversity, it is uncanny to believe that there was more than one category for this art movement, but of course this is true. Romanticism is broken down into categories such as landscapes and shipwrecks alongside the sublime, portraiture, nationalism and evocation, as well as imaginative sensibility; more specifically the categories of Romanticism are…

The Grand Canyon Boulders Taller than the Great Tower of Seville by Garcia Lopez de Cardenas and The Most Sublime Spectacle on Earth by John Wesley Powell are two stories with different opinions of The Grand Canyon. The first story shows how The Grand Canyon can be very annoying and not worth of seeing. The second story shows how The Grand Canyon can be very fascinating; therefore the author has trouble explaining his whole trip. Boulders Taller than the Great Tower of Seville by de Cardenas…