Abstract

Abstract:Antarctica has long been associated with the sublime and it has also been imagined as the site of catastrophe—of both the deaths of early explorers and as a current indicator of global warming. This essay examines how trauma is a structural element of the sublime in accounts and images of Antarctica. It focuses on the literary and artistic works of two periods when representation of the experience of the continent has been articulated with discourses of trauma: the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration and from the 1990s to the present day. In this latter period writers, photographers and artists have returned to the matrix of the traumatic sublime that the work of explorers such as R. F. Scott, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and Herbert Ponting created to explore the relationship between humans and the non-human environment and of Antarctica to modernity.