This is an extended meditation on ethics in literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works at the level both of the work and of the world, the ethics of seeing, and the question of how one can give up on the here and now (...) and behold instead some other, better ethical sphere. Seneca's tragedies offer words of caution: desire might well subvert reason at its most profound level, or humanity's painful separation from the sublime might be part of some cruel divine plan. The book concludes by considering what, if anything, we are to make of Seneca's efforts to enlighten us. (shrink)

Often labelled as "indescribable," the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: · The legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the post-modern and avant-garde sublimity · The major theorists of the sublime (...) such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each · The significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era · How the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch's neo-noir This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory. (shrink)

This book examines the role of scepticism in initiating the idea of the sublime in early modern British literature. James Noggle draws on philosophy, intellectual history, and critical theory to illuminate the aesthetic ideology of Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester among other important writers of the period. The Skeptical Sublime compares the view of sublimity presented by these authors with that of the dominant, liberal tradition of eighteenth-century criticism to offer a new understanding of how these writers helped construct (...) proto-aesthetic categories that stabilized British culture after years of civil war and revolution, while at the same time their scepticism allowed them to express ambivalence about the emerging social order. (shrink)

This edited collection had its origins in a two-day conference held at the Tate Britain, organised collaboratively by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium in order to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's famous book on the sublime. The conference was funded by Middlesex University, the London Consortium and the Tate Britain's AHRC-funded "Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language" research project. The conference set out to critically examine the legacy of the (...) sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and to assess the value and the dangers of this concept as it is articulated in current thought and practice. The book selected from and expanded on the papers delivered at the conference in order to pursue this goal further. It was broken into themed sections (each of which had an introduction), each exploring an different issue around contemporary uses of the sublime. The sections were: 1. Nature, Ecology and the Sublime; 2. The Sublime After Kant; 3. Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime; 4. Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime; 5. The Cinematic Sublime. The volume reflects the interdisiplinarity of the concept of the sublime today, and includes essays whose appraoches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Mark Bould (University of the West of England), Eu Jin Chua (London Consortium), Gudrun Filipska (Middlesex University), Cornelia Klinger (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna / University of Tübingen, Germany), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), William McDonald (Middlesex Univeristy), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), Claire Pajaczkowska (Royal College of Art), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Gene Ray (Geneva University of Art and Design), Bettina Reiber (Central St. Martins), Jan Rosiek (University of Copenhagen), Sherryl Vint (Brock University, Canada), and Luke White (Middlesex University). (shrink)

Awe seems to be a complex emotion or emotional construct characterized by a mix of positive (contentment, happiness), and negative affective components (fear and a sense of being smaller, humbler or insignificant). It is striking that the elicitors of awe correspond closely to what philosophical aesthetics, and especially Burke and Kant, have called “the sublime.” As a matter of fact, awe is almost absent from the philosophical agenda, while there are very few studies on the experience of the sublime as (...) such in the psychological literature. The aim of this paper is to throw light on the complex relationship between awe (as understood by psychologists) and the experience of the sublime (as discussed by philosophers). We distinguish seven ways of conceiving this relationship and highlight those that seem more promising to us. Once we have a clearer picture of how awe and the experience of the sublime are related, we can use it to enhance collaboration between these domains. We would be able to use empirical results about awe in a philosophical analysis of the experience of the sublime, which in turn can help us to design novel experimental hypotheses about the contexts in which we experience awe. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida and by Paul de Man . And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is it (...) a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction’s “others”? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives. The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices. (shrink)

The article considers some aspects of the problem of both individual and collective identity in the context of the development of different kinds of warfare in modern western society. The elucidation of these relations requires an unexpected application of aesthetic ideas; in particular the notion of the sublime. It is argued that the experience of combat is one possible ‘real’ form of the sublime. It is further suggested, paradoxically, that sublime combat cannot actually be experienced; it is an ‘inexperience’. The (...) historical significance of modern western war literature, thus, is just that it fills the ‘gap’ left by the destructive inexperience of combat and it allows those who endured it, as well as those who did not, to construct a ‘memory’ of the events themselves. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comBefore even opening the pages of Bart Vandenabeele’s The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, it is an encouraging sight to behold. For, there are surprisingly few single-author monographs focused solely on Schopenhauer’s aesthetic philosophy, at least in the Anglophone literature—much less on Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime in particular, as is rightfully boasted in the (...) blurb to Vandenabeele’s book. The paucity of such books is all the more surprising given, first, that Schopenhauer is often noted as having continuously exerted an influence upon artists and writers from the time of his own life up to the present day; and second, and more relevantly to Vandenabeele’s book, that few philosophers have held aesthetic experience, of nature as well as art, in any higher regard... (shrink)

Cefalu offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory -- including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic -- can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture. The book argues that when selected Early Modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some sublime aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems "Other" to himself. This divine Other, while sometimes presented directly (...) as a void or empty place, is more often filled in and presented instead as some form of divine excess. While Donne, and to a lesser extent Traherne, disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw, and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature’s and God's intrinsic alterity. Cefalu introduces new ways of theorizing not only seventeenth-century religious ideologies, but also the nature of Early Modern subjectivity. (shrink)

In White Noise by Don DeLillo, two characters visit a famous barn, described as the “most photographed barn in America” alongside hordes of picture-taking tourists. One of them complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore. This implies that there was once a real barn, which has been lost in the “virtual” image. This is in line with Plato’s concept of the simulacrum as a false or “corrupt” copy, which has lost all (...) connection with the “original.” Plotinus, however, offered a different definition: the simulacrum distorts reality in order to reveal the invisible, the Ideal. There is a real building which has been called “the most photographed barn in America”: the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park. The location—barn in the foreground, mountain range towering over it—forms a striking visual composition. But the site is not only famous because it is photogenic. Images of the barn in part evoke the heroic struggles of pioneers living on the frontier. They also draw on the tradition of the “American sublime.” Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the sublime as “the influx of the Divine mind into our mind.” He followed Plotinus in valuing art as a means of “revelation”—with the artist as a kind of prophet or “seer.” The photographers who collect at the Moulton Barn are themselves consciously working within this tradition, and turning themselves into do-it-yourself “artist-seers.” They are the creators, not the slaves of the simulacrum. (shrink)

This article considers tropes of fragmentation and immersion in photographs made by Frederick Sommer in the 1940s. It problematizes Kant-derived conceptions of the sublime, arguing that the radical nature of Sommer's work of this period challenges dyadic relationships of the figure/ground that are associated with depictions of the Kantian sublime. Reviewing some of the writing on Sommer's work to date, the article draws upon a close reading of his photographic prints and technique in the context of his wider practice, and (...) alongside work done over the past four decades in Literature Studies, Feminist Studies, Lesbian and Gay Studies, and Classical Studies, to propose that a model of the Sapphic sublime is appropriate to Sommer's work of this period. (shrink)

: In 1999, Philosophy and Literature gave the top prize in its annual Bad Writing Contest to Judith Butler, and the national press echoed the journal in denouncing critical theory as overblown, jargon-ridden, and ungrammatical. Academic theorists reacted with pique, but not a soul in the public sphere came to their defense. Now, the professors have issued an anthology justifying their prose and denouncing Denis Dutton and other critics of bad writing. They claim that bad, or rather "difficult" writing (...) has a critical thrust: to break down common sense and dismantle unjust social notions.They fail to make their case. Much of the writing is, alas, bad. Entries offer tendentious, petulant reactions to the hubbub. Rarely do they address the basic point of the contest: that humanities professors no longer respect ideals of wit, eloquence, and learning. Instead, we have another parade of academic parochialism and radical chic passing itself off as adversarial culture and social justice. (shrink)

This study seeks to update and expand the models of mind and consciousness that Ferdinand de Saussure conceived for the appreciation of linguistic signs. As a response to his theorization of the dual essence of language, this study proposes a theorization of pleasure and understanding deriving from our engagement with daunting situations in nature and culture. To begin with, the author discusses current neuroimaging findings that reveal how we may gain from low-arousal emotions. Certain benefits have been recognized that increase (...) the pleasure and delight we may obtain through conscientious mental work rather than via instincts and preferences. Thus, in this context, the Saussurean network of differences is seen to be capable of generating motivated neural links that function to adjust our viewpoints. Further, in light of Adolphe Pictet’s mingling of philosophical aesthetics and linguistics, this study corrects a misapplication of another Saussurean model in appreciating the Kantian notions of imagination and the sublime. Instead of judging this model as a revelation of one single ideal viewpoint, Pictet’s approach invites us to appreciate it as the functioning of a rigorous yet practical mind that is capable of devising multiple and useful perspectives. Notions of the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful are therefore equated as legitimate viewpoints that we should draw on so as to survive dealing with daunting situations in nature and culture. Finally, this study unifies and fortifies the Saussurean models through aligning them with a phenomenological approach to our memories, sensations and perceptions. Such integration empowers our imagination and confidence while we are widening our horizons to invent larger contexts for our objects of inquiry. All in all, the author cherishes the Saussurean models as a combination of the linguistic, the aesthetic and the moral laws that altogether sharpen our way of devising rationales that may boost the wellbeing of the community. (shrink)

Miguel de Unamuno’s theory of tragic sentiment is central to understanding his unique contributions to religious existential thought, which centers on the production of perhaps the most unavoidable and distinctive kind of human feeling. His theory is rightly attributed with being influenced by the gestational thought of, inter alios, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, but within these pages I should like to suggest a peculiar kinship between seemingly strange bedfellows, namely, between Unamuno and Immanuel Kant. Although the relationship between Unamuno and (...) Kant is conflicted, ranging from clear indications of influence to expressions of antipathy, there has been relatively little comparative research done on these two thinkers. Moreover, this scant literature has mainly explored connections between Unamuno’s existential thought and Kant’s first two Critiques. In these works, however, feelings are regarded as inclinations and thus receive no serious consideration. In what follows, I therefore juxtapose Unamuno’s analysis of tragic feeling in The Tragic Sense of Life with Kant’s discussion of the feelings of beauty and the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

An eloquent and sometimes even erotic book, the Philosophical Enquiry was long dismissed as a piece of mere juvenilia. However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also one of the first major works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has fascinated thinkers from Kant and Coleridge to the philosophers and critics of today. This is the only (...) available edition of the work. (shrink)

The cosmic sublime, as the most spectacular manifestation of the natural sublime, offers rich stimuli for the literary imagination, as well as for various interactions between science, culture and art. In her book of poetry Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith uses tropes of cosmic perspective, scientific gaze and interplanetary travel to problematize the relationship between human finitude and the boundless unknown of the universe. Written after the death of her father, who was one of the engineers of the Hubble (...) telescope, the volume links personal elegy and the work of mourning with philosophical questions about the relationship between the self and scientifically framed visions of the cosmos. The primary intention of my study is to examine the strategies and implications of the poet’s revisionary engagement with the aesthetics, rhetoric, popular mythology and mysticism of the spatial infinite. Smith employs the cosmic sublime not only as a spatial mode of perception but also as a metaphor of the emotional response to death. Her adaptation of the category expands the frame of reference for the purposes of an existential inquiry into the nature of humanity and transcendence. The celebration of imaginative freedom and modern science’s command of nature is further linked to constant apprehension about the human abuse of power and to anxieties triggered by the sublime mythology of transcendence, informed by a desire for dominating the other to the point of possession. (shrink)

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of (...) art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms."In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise. (shrink)

By the eighteenth century, the term 'sublime' was used to communicate a sense of unfathomable and awe-inspiring greatness, whether in nature or thought. The relationship of sublimity to classical definitions of beauty was much debated, but the first philosopher to portray them as opposing forces was Edmund Burke. Originally published in 1757 and reissued here in the revised second edition of 1759, this influential treatise explores the psychological origins of both ideas. Presented as distinct consequences of very separate emotional lineages, (...) beauty and sublimity are traced back through a web of human feelings, from self-preservation instincts to lust. Burke's doctrine of the sublime was to have far-reaching effects. In Britain, it informed perceptions of landscape in art and literature for years to come. Meanwhile, on the continent, Kant regarded Burke as 'the foremost author' in 'the empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments'. (shrink)

This two-chapter work brings together Heraclitus, Kant, and Nietzsche in an effort to explore transition and motion, two concepts derived from Kant’s Opus Postumum that the author argues are indications of Kant’s cosmological-aesthetic approach in his late work. At times, the book seems to want to be a work of Kant scholarship, addressing the question of the role of the Opus Postumum in the Kantian corpus. Indeed, the most sustained engagements with secondary literature occur in the sections on Kant. (...) At other times, however, Erman Kaplama extracts the notion of transition from Kant’s work in order to make broader claims about the way in which the human faculty of sense intuition... (shrink)

An eloquent and sometimes even erotic book, the Philosophical Enquiry was long dismissed as a piece of mere juvenilia. However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form is now recognized as not only an important and influential work of aesthetic theory, but also one of the first major works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has fascinated thinkers from Kant and Coleridge to the philosophers and critics of today. This is the only (...) available edition of the work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Writing On the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke tells us the ideas most capable of making an impression are those related to self-preservation and society. Such ideas are bound to our passions. Passions belonging to self-preservation turn on pain or danger.1 Those belonging to society do as well, although in this work, Burke dwells exclusively on pain. Because he tells us the king of terrors is death, we might infer pain is inferior to danger, the latter more formidable. We experience (...) delight in both when they are remote and do not affect us. But this delight, or indeed pleasure of any kind, is less powerful in terms of passion. Possibly for this reason Burke declines to qualify delight or pleasure as a source... (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s work on the sublimity of aesthetic experience lends itself to puzzlement, if not misclassification. Complicating matters, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of sublimity: respectively, the “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime. More mystifying is that the sublime is ineffable, beyond the ken of human comprehension. These perplexities notwithstanding, Kant argues that sublime sentiment produces a feeling of supersensible comfort. Commentators identify this comfort emanating most strongly from the dynamical sublime. However, in this paper I draw from the unity of reason (...) thesis to offer a plausible account of how the mathematical sublime is equally capable of providing the same feeling of supersensible comfort. (shrink)

To what extent does the construction of any curriculum framework have to contain axiological assumptions? Educators have been made aware of tacit epistemological assumptions underlying existing curricular frameworks by the continual demands for their revision. Eisner suggested that curriculum policy should be centred around imagination; economic rationalists have suggested that it be made more functional and accountable than traditional university disciplines allow for. Is it possible, as Efland suggests, to combine competing traditional ideologies of education in a complex postmodern pastiche (...) which can nonetheless provide standards of assessment and evaluation without presuming a grand narrative? Brown suggests not. This paper examines the challenge of maintaining principled standards and recognising postmodern relativities, making particular reference to the notion of the sublime and the arts curriculum. (shrink)

The criticism has been made that Kant looks racist, at least in his early work. This, however, is to insist on a literal reading. I explore Kant’s use of irony and satire as he battles to defend his vision. I show the rhetoric of irony in a pivotal text, looking at what happens and why.

Burke's Enquiry is one of those books that hovers, importantly but ineffectively, at the fringes of the attention of most modern readers of philosophy. It is something that they have always meant to read some time but yet which they all too seldom get around to actually reading. Its neglect, no doubt, is mainly to be accounted for as part of the generally rather forlorn position of aesthetics in our intellectual landscape. Students of literature disregard aesthetics as at once (...) too schematic and abstract for their purposes and as too often the work of people inadequately equipped for and experienced in the direct criticism of literature and the arts. Although the dominant style of modern criticism had as one of its principal sources a fairly consciously philosophical inquiry into the nature of literature, namely Richard's Principles of Literary Criticism , in its prevailing form, as manifested in the writings of Dr. Leavis and his fol-lowers, it is hostile to any pretensions to critical relevance on the part of academic philosophy. If it rejects impressionism for determinedly intellectual analysis of the detail of literature, it still relies on philosophy only in the loosest and most colloquial sense of the word in so far as it embodies a definitely articulated point of view on questions of morality. On the other hand, aesthetics has only figured in the most fitful and peripheral manner on the agenda of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Recent Darwin scholarship has provided grounds for recognising the Origin as a literary as well as a scientific achievement. While Darwin was an acute observer, a gifted experimentalist and indefatigable theorist, this essay argues that it was also crucial to his impact that the Origin transcended the putative divide between the scientific and the literary. Analysis of Darwin's development as a writer between his journal-keeping on HMS Beagle and his construction of the Origin argues the latter draws on the pattern (...) of the Romantic or Kantian sublime. The Origin repeatedly uses strategies which challenge the natural-theological appeal to the imagination in conceiving nature. Darwin's sublime coaches the Origin's readers into a position from which to envision nature that reduces and contains its otherwise overwhelming complexity. As such, it was Darwin's literary achievement that enabled him to fashion a new 'habit of looking at things in a given way' that is the centrepiece of the scientific revolution bearing his name. (shrink)

Recent Darwin scholarship has provided grounds for recognising the Origin as a literary as well as a scientific achievement. While Darwin was an acute observer, a gifted experimentalist and indefatigable theorist, this essay argues that it was also crucial to his impact that the Origin transcended the putative divide between the scientific and the literary. Analysis of Darwin’s development as a writer between his journal-keeping on HMS Beagle and his construction of the Origin argues the latter draws on the pattern (...) of the Romantic or Kantian sublime. The Origin repeatedly uses strategies which challenge the natural-theological appeal to the imagination in conceiving nature. Darwin’s sublime coaches the Origin’s readers into a position from which to envision nature that reduces and contains its otherwise overwhelming complexity. As such, it was Darwin’s literary achievement that enabled him to fashion a new ‘habit of looking at things in a given way’ that is the centrepiece of the scientific revolution bearing his name. (shrink)

Due to the historic separation of cognition and emotion, the affective aspects of learning are often seen as trivial in comparison to the more ‘essential’ cognitive qualities—particularly in science. We are taught that science should objectively scrutinize the world in search of answers, and science educators have been taught to look to scientists to guide their teaching of content and processes.2 As a result, science pedagogy characteristically instructs students to step back from objects and events in order to dispassionately observe (...) and analyze them. In an attempt to guide students towards thinking like scientists, the process of scientific inquiry is typically the focus in science. What is left out, of course .. (shrink)

From its first significant appearance in physics, the notion of probability has been linked in the minds of physicists with the notion of uncertainty. But the link may prove to be tenuous, if quantum mechanics, construed in terms of the Everett interpretation, is anything to go by.

This essay is concerned with modern and postmodern theories of the sublime and with a possible theological response to them. The essay first discusses the “modern sublime” and the “postmodern sublime” , and shows how these versions of the sublime terminate in one or the other form of “pure immanence” and, hence, are not sublime in any standard sense of the term. The essay then argues, in a second part, for an aesthetic of the beautiful and the sublime based upon (...) the theological doctrine of the analogy of being as articulated in the past century by Erich Przywara, S. J. (shrink)

Through the idea of the sublime, Kant articulated a type of aesthetic judgement whereby one experiences the limits of cognition and representation. The result of this, for Kant, is the demonstration and cultivation of our moral nature. Lyotard reframes the idea of the sublime in terms of post-modernity through his development of the idea of the event. The experience of the event is roughly equivalent to the experience of the sublime. Crucially though, the experience of the event, unlike the sublime, (...) does not foster individual morality; rather, it points to injustices. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to the Εἰκόνες of the two Philostrati and to the Ἐκφράσεις of Callistratus, that is to say to three Greek works that bear important witness to the genre of art criticism in Antiquity and which concern both literary history and the history of art. The first series of Εἰκόνες is the work of Philostratus the Elder (2nd-3rd century AD) and comprises sixty-five descriptions of paintings with mythological subjects, which the author assures us he has seen in (...) a gallery in Naples. Another Philostratus, who claims to be the grandson of the former, and who is traditionally referred to as Philostratus the Younger, wrote a second, shorter series of Εἰκόνες, which describes seventeen paintings. Finally, a certain Callistratus, who probably dates from the 4th century AD, is the author of the Ἐκφράσεις, which group together fourteen descriptions of statues in marble and bronze.1 Ecphrasis is a subject that is often the focus of contemporary research. Perhaps its importance stems from the fact that we live in a civilization dominated by images, and we feel the need to control the visual imagery that surrounds us, to govern it and to make sense of it through language. The attention given to literary theory, rhetoric and sophistry today also helps to explain the success of this subject. The present book is situated in this field of research. The "La Licorne" series in which it is published specializes in the study of ancient and modern literature, a specialization to which this volume corresponds. This volume has two points of focus: (1) the literary form of description and the complex relationships between word and image, between the oral and the visual (hence the title Le défi de l'art, which signifies, among other things, that the art of the painter and of the sculptor challenges the sophist, who tries to describe works of art with words); (2) the Nachleben of ancient texts, because Philostratus and Callistratus were well-known to posterity, particularly during the Renaissance. (shrink)

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to (...) other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)