The Sublime Reader

Robert R. Clewis is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at Gwynedd Mercy University, USA and is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. He is author of The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (2009), a translator of Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology (2012), and editor of Reading Kant’s Lectures (2015).

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments: Sources
Acknowledgments
Note on the Texts

Editor’s Introduction
Part I. Ancient
1.Longinus, from On Sublimity
2.Bharata-Muni, from Na?yasastra

Part II. Postclassical
3.Guo Xi, from The Interest of Lofty Forests and Springs
4.Zeami Motokiyo, “Notes on the Nine Levels”
5.Francesco Petrarca, “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux”

Part III. Modern
6.Nicolas Boileau Despréaux, from “Preface to his Translation of Longinus On the Sublime”
7.John Dennis, from The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry
8.Giambattista Vico, “On the Heroic Mind”
9.Edmund Burke, from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
10.Moses Mendelssohn, from “On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences”
11.Elizabeth Carter, from Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu
12.Immanuel Kant, from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
13.Anna Aiken (Anna Letitia Barbauld), “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”
14.Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Men
15.Immanuel Kant, from Critique of the Power of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
16.Friedrich Schiller, “Of the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas)”
17.Anna Seward, Letter to Rev. Dr. Gregory
18.Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolfo: A Romance
19.Helen Maria Williams, from A Tour in Switzerland

Part IV. Late Modern
20.William Wordsworth, “The Sublime and the Beautiful”
21.Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
22.Arthur Schopenhauer, from The World as Will and Representation
23.Georg W. F. Hegel, “Symbolism of the Sublime”
24.Richard Wagner, from “Beethoven”
25.Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy, Joyful Wisdom, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra
26.Rudolf Otto, from The Idea of the Holy

Part V. Contemporary
27.Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now”
28.Julia Kristeva, from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
29.Fredric Jameson, from “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism”
30.Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde”
31.Meg Armstrong, from “‘The Effects of Blackness’: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant”
32.Cynthia A. Freeland, “The Sublime in Cinema”
33.Arthur Danto, “Beauty and Sublimity”
34.Vladimir J. Konecni, “The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills”
35.Jane Forsey, “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”
36.Sandra Shapshay, “Commentary on Jane Forsey’s ‘Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?’”
37.Robert R. Clewis, “Towards A Theory of the Sublime and Aesthetic Awe”
38.Emily Brady, “The Environmental Sublime”

Chapter Summaries

Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
1.Guo Xi, Early Spring, 1072
2.Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948
3.Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-1951
4.Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, c. 1817