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Reinventing
the Sublime looks at the return of the sublime in postmodernity,
and at intimations of a ‘post-Romantic’ sublime in Romanticism
itself. The sublime is explored as a discourse of ‘invention’
– taking the Latin meaning of to ‘come upon’,
‘find’, ‘discover’ – that involves
an encounter with the new, the unregulated and the surprising. Lyotard
and Žižek, among others, have reconfigured the sublime
for postmodernity by exceeding the subject-centred discourse of
Romantic aesthetics, and promoting not a sublime of the subject,
but of the unpresentable, the ‘Real’, the unknown, the
other.
… Reinventing the Sublime
looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and postmodern ‘inventions’
of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship
of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history,
including ‘9/11’. It reads Burke and Kant alongside
postmodern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey
and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism,
and considers ‘modernist’ inflections of the sublime
in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the
themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines
the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M
Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard’s reading of
the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular
and disruptive ‘event’, to argue that the sublime in
its postmodern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative
relationship to the ironies of temporality and history.
… Reinventing the Sublime focuses on the endurance
of the sublime in contemporary thinking, and on the way that the
sublime can be read as a figure of the relationship of representation
to temporality itself.
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List of Contents to follow
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Reviews to follow |
Publication Details
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Hardback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-177-1 |
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Page Extent / Format: |
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272 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
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Release Date: |
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March 2013 |
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Illustrated: |
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No |
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Hardback Price: |
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£55.00 / $67.50 |
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