Notions of the Sublime: The Unquiet Mind in Tieck's Über Das Erhabene and Der Runenberg

Abstract

I argue that aspects of Tieck’s essay-fragment Über das Erhabene can provide insights into the psychic aberrations experienced by Christian in Der Runenberg. By uniting the rhetorical sublime of Longinus with the aesthetic sublime of Burke and Kant (and additional theories of sublimity by Carl Grosse and Johann Georg Sulzer), Tieck reveals a broad knowledge of this important eighteenth-century aesthetic category. Additionally, selected passages from his unfinished Das Buch über Shakespeare (1794–) demonstrate his continued engagement with sublimity and madness. Given the approximate decade-long interval between his essay-fragment and Runenberg, I suggest William Lovell as a thematic midpoint and link in which Tieck begins to actualize Romantic notions of madness and sublimity implicit in many of his early writings. Turning to Runenberg, I concentrate on one taxonomy (‘Melancholie, Verrücktheit, Wahnsinn’) from Tieck’s essay-fragment and argue that Christian experiences neither a mobile inner journey nor a dynamic outer one, but rather an inner disconnectedness and fixation as a result of the self’s inadequacy and corruptibility in the face of nature and its experience of the sublime. The article concludes by contextualizing Tieck’s representation of melancholy and madness within eighteenth-century theoretical considerations of psychopathology, specifically by alluding to Kant’s essay Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes.