Understanding Thomas Weiskels The Romantic Sublime :: Essays Papers

Understanding Thomas Weiskels The Romantic SublimeIn coiffe to understand Weiskels argument on the sublime, it would be helpful to briefly review the influential treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Immanuel Kant and Edmund. Longinus understands the sublime as intrinsically relate to linguistics, as being achieved mainly through language and literature. The linguistic sublime causes one to transcend oneself. When one perceives an experience as producing ecstasy, he asserts, that experience finish be considered sublime. According to Longinus, this effect can be achieved through powerful rhetoric he then examines the sublime nature of the rhetoric of many nifty writers, including Homer and Sappho. He also considers the sublime to exist in political oration, theorizing those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardor and as it were illumining our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of subliminity which are within us (84). Longi nus cautions, however, that writers who strive to achieve sublimity often fail, instead creating expressions . . . which are not sublime but distinguished (77). He further elaborates that it is nearly impossible for the common writer to achieve sublimity through rhetoric, stating that, While tumidity desires to transcend the limits of the sublime, the defect which is termed puerility is the direct antithesis of elevation. Writers substantially fall prey to this error, Longinus explains While they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected (77). Longinus theory focuses mainly on a sublime that results from a thing or event that possesses some type of positive literary effect. For Longinus, one is uplifted by the received sublime . . . filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard (78). Edmund Burke, alternatively, makes a distinction between what is beautiful (and pleasa nt) and the sublime, concluding that an experience that might be considered awful may instead inspire a peculiar sense of pleasure, a delight derived from terror. It is Burkes opinion that human experience with a negative connotation tends to turn on the sublime. Burke proposes that the sublime is whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror (36). Burkes sublime is achieved through a type of indirect or derived terror, in which one experiences pleasure in the font of pain or terror.