Lemma Sublime

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023

Longinus introduced sublimity as a type of eminence or excellence of discourse, especially in literature and oratory. In ancient times, poetry was believed to be the finest product of art and this can be traced in the writings of great Greek thinkers like Aristotle, Plato and Longinus. Longinus advocates for the assimilation of certain qualities which, together, produces sublime feelings or expressions. It should be noted that there is distinction between grandeur and sublimity; grandeur produces amazement and wonder, but sublimity encompasses a combination of wonder and an ability to transport the mind with an irresistible power. Longinus declares that Sublimity, if produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power as a single blow. This paper will try to investigate different stages of the ‘sublime’ as a style in poetry within the rhetorical tradition of the ancient Greco-Roman world, its core nature, and the way it operates to build the soul of a lofty art product. It will also try to re-understand Longinus’s theory of sublimity, its importance and relevance.

When thinking about the sublime, most people would spontaneously refer to an aesthetic experience -be it in nature, in art or in the self -that destabilises us, that evokes conflicting emotions of awe and fear, of horror and fascination, or that escapes our human understanding. codified by edmund burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, the sublime often appears as the impressive and the awe-inspiring that is opposed to the orderly and balanced nature of the beautiful. In this (simplified) narrative, the sublime is then often historicised as a relatively late concept or, as Jean-françois Lyotard would have it, as a mode of sensibility that is specific to modernity itself. however, the sublime is a much older notion and cannot be confined to the birth of aesthetics in the eighteenth century. originally, the sublime is a rhetorical concept that finds its main source in the treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sub lime), probably written in the first century Ad by an anonymous author, who is generally referred to as Longinus. the importance of On the Sublime resides in the fact that it deals with the strong persuasive and emotional effect of speech or literature on the listener or reader. It addresses the question of how language can move us deeply, how it can transport, overwhelm, and astonish the reader or listener. It destabilises so to speak the fixed position between a reader, an author and a text or speech. 'for the true sublime', Longinus writes, 'naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard.' 1 So already from its very beginnings the sublime appears as a profoundly liminal concept that questions the boundaries between representation and the subject beholding it. As emma Gilby has argued elsewhere, the Longinian sublime is always about 'an encounter'. 2 It creates a close contact, or even a clash, with the object represented, while it also establishes a deep, indeed intimate, communication between an author and a reader or listener through a text or speech.

2010

The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime, ed. Cian Duffy, 2023

This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, 2020

What is the sublime? This entry defines the "sublime" and presents its historical context, focusing on its conceptual and philosophical aspects. The sublime denotes an intense, charged emotion with high arousal and containing a mixed valence (i.e. negative-to-positive). A sublime experience is an aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that is otherwise often experienced as menacing or overwhelming. Yet the experience is overall positive and pleasing. Second, this entry surveys several themes disputed in the literature: the sublime's relation to beauty, fear, and awe, why it is pleasing, and its being self-referential or reflexive. Third, the entry summarizes recent empirical research on the topic. The sublime has received relatively little scientific attention, only beginning in the past decade. A prominent empirical approach to the sublime conceptualizes it as having a fear component, although some recent studies have begun to question this. Finally, the entry concludes with a reflection on the sublime and the possible.

Mnemosyne, 2019

The sublime plays an important role in recent publications on Greek and Latin literature. On the one hand, scholars try to make sense of ancient Greek theories of the sublime, both in Longinus’ On the Sublime and in other rhetorical texts. On the other hand, the sublime, in its ancient and modern manifestations presented by thinkers from Longinus to Burke, Kant and Lyotard, has proved to be a productive tool for interpreting the works of Latin poets like Lucretius, Lucan and Seneca. But what is the sublime? And how does the Greek rhetorical sublime in Longinus relate to the Roman literary sublime in Lucretius and other poets? This article reviews James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity: it evaluates Porter’s innovative approach to the ancient sublime, and considers the ways in which it might change our understanding of an important, but somewhat enigmatic concept.

2019