Art, Literature, the Sublime, and Tragic Fear
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Announcements:
(1) ASSIGNMENT FOR WEDNESDAY: Please read Lawrence Sargent Hall's short story, "The Ledge," from e-reserve and write a brief response describing your reactions to the story. In particular please describe your emotional response to story, as well as any reflections upon those emotions that you may wish to add. You may also submit your response to the class email list by Wednesday or by hard copy/email to me.
(2) Dead River Rough Cut : another showing on a Friday 2 pm, location TBA.
(3) Two handouts: Burke’s outline of the sublime; Thoreau’s passage from The Maine Woods
Term paper prospectus due this Friday, April 1
II. FILM CLIP of NIAGARA TRAILER
III. Edmund Burke and the Sublime
See also Cronon’s essay on wilderness
Twin phenomena of the Gothic versus the Sublime discussed in Berton
“The Ledge” and the sublime
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful. http://www.bartleby.com/24/2 . Burke writes that "terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime."
The importance of astonishment : "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other" [Burke, On the Sublime , ed. J. T. Bolton. 58]
The opposition of beauty and sublimity in Burke
"The ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject, without considerably lessening the effect of the one or the other upon the passions'' [113-114].
Importance of perception and the emotional effect upon the perceiver.
Impact of Burke’s ideas on Romantics—e.g., English painter J. M. W. Turner
Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842
IV. Effect of Burke’s ideas on Thoreau
