Stages of the Sublime in North America

Abstract

A contemporary French theorist tells us that "[t]he sublime is in fashion (à la mode)"--and not only in France, nor just in theory. 1 He goes on to remark that in fact the sublime was inevitably "de la mode . . . because it has always concerned a break within or from aesthetics." It marks the instance of discontinuity in experience, the moment of loss and disfigurement. What goes unremarked, however, is the paradox by which that moment is registered in experience, enabling the sublime to retain a measure of aesthetic coherence. So understood, it is figured as modern, modernist (Adorno), or even (in Lyotard's attention to "the sublime is now") postmodern. 2 It might be that our preoccupation with the status of modernity and modernism helps explain the current fashion for talk of the sublime. Such talk is in any event quite different from an eighteenth-century and equally a Romantic interest in certain features of experience adjudged to be sublime. True, the sublime has by now come to form part of the furniture of our common world (artistic, philosophical, or everyday). Yet that should not blind us to the attendant fact that--as with other categories of aesthetics--the sublime is historically specific, and has been taken in a variety of ways. We should be wary of reifying it, [End Page 909] therefore, but equally wary of reading one sense of the sublime backwards or forwards into another time period, thus assimilating history to theory. For all its historical contingency, we may nonetheless continue to speak of the sublime, or more cautiously, of styles of the sublime.