The Western Theory of Tradition: Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime

J. Gary Taylor; Patricia J. Scharlin

Published by Yale University Press 1989

The Western Theory of Tradition

Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime

J. Gary Taylor and Patricia J. Scharlin

https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300160536

Overview
Contents

About this book

This elegantly written book offers a new way to conceive of cultural tradition. Sanford Budick reveals an operative concept of Western cultures that has been only partially understood: according to this concept, the act of freely receiving and handing on cultural tradition and the act of achieving moral and aesthetic freedom in sublime representation are the same phenomenon. This dual phenomenon Budick calls the cultural sublime, and he traces it in literary, philosophical, and artistic works from Homer, Virgil, and the Bible to Rembrandt, Milton, Kant, Baudelaire, Freud, and Sarraute.

Budick shows that if we cannot accomplish the cultural sublime, the act of tradition-making becomes impossible and the sublime degenerates into a pseudo-sublime. Thereafter, what claims to be tradition is no more than pure coercion that employs a pseudo-sublime as an instrument of victimization. By describing the terms and paradigms of the cultural sublime, Budick distinguishes tradition from pseudo-tradition and the structures of sublime representation from those of a pseudo-sublime. The making of tradition, he asserts, is always a struggle against the representations of a pseudo-sublime.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Figures Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xxi
1. The Cultural Sublime: Descartes, Kant, and Rembrandt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. The Cultural Sublime: Descartes, Kant, and Rembrandt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
3. The Second-State Self in the Scene of Victimization and Resistance: Hegel and Virgil Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
4. The Surrealism of “Respect” for Tradition: Virgil, Homer, Kant Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
5. Apostrophe in the Westering Sublime: The Matrilineal Muse of Homer, Virgil, Dryden, Pope, and T. S. Eliot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
6. Counterperiodization and the Colloquial:Wordsworth and “the Days of Dryden and Pope” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
7. The Reinvention of Desire: Milton’s (and Ezekiel’s) Sublime Melancholia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
8. Self-Endangerment and Obliviousness in “Personal Culture”: Goethe’s “Manifold” Tasso Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
9. The Modernity of Learning: Baudelaire’s and Delacroix’s Tasso “roulant un manuscrit” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
10. Limping: Freud’s Experience of Death in His Tassovian Line of Thought Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	180
11. The Real in the Commonplace: Sarraute’s Feminine Sublime of Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
12. Of the Fragment: In Memory of Our Son Yochanan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	222
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291

Language: English
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages
- Main content: 320

eBook

Published: February 12, 2018
ISBN: 9780300160536