Natural Sublime Research Articles

Managing Spirituality

This article outlines four techniques through which the National Park Service manages the spirituality of park visitors: (1) the maintenance of bodily discipline; (2) evocation of the natural sublime; (3) implication of global interconnectedness; and (4) facilitation of individual differentiation. These techniques work together to construct spirituality as a private investment in the public space of the park. I argue that the National Park Service thus creates structural links between the individuality of visitors and a certain way of organizing the parks, a way that appears natural and is highly managed by the state. In this way a private, individualistic nature spirituality takes on the character of public religion.

Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840 by James Chandler, Kevin Gilmartin

I96 Reviews time theparallels arewith the Welsh rather than the Scots, and Campbell's Gertrude centres on amassacre perpetrated byMohawks led by thewhite Major JohnButler. Already there is amove away from the radical representations of the I790s towards aweaker Romanticism, seen in Mrs Hemans andMrs Barbauld and perhaps inFeni more Cooper (forHazlitt 'theAmerican Walter Scott'), though the focus here is on theBritish, but tocomplete his tripartitestructure, in 'NativeAmerican Writing' Ful fordallows Norton, William Apes, JohnHunter (to give them their more manageable English names), and others a say,drawing on theirown hybridity in effect to decon struct some of the stereotypes. In an already overcrowded book it ishard to do them justice, though that isnever what they received. Fulford's cut-offpoint, I830, is that of theRemoval Act, when Manifest Destiny was beginning to rule out more benign alternatives glimpsed in theprevious century, if more often in fiction than in fact. NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY JOHN SAUNDERS Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene ofBritish Culture, I780-1840. Ed. by JAMES CHANDLER and KEVIN GILMARTIN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Xiii+29 I pp. ?5O. ISBN 978-0-52I-83901-3. This book is 'notabout London as such', theeditors announce. But, as theyconcede, London 'looms large' inmost of the essays collected inRomantic Metropolis (p. 2). In fact, although the volume is framed by Ian Duncan's discussion of Edinburgh as 'cultural metropolis of empire' (p. 5I) and Celeste Langan's analysis of Byron's response to the 'cultural deterioration and political reduction' ofVenice to a 'petty province of an empire' after '1,300years of uninterrupted sovereignty' (pp. 263, 26I), all the other essays and much of the introduction are primarily concerned with the social and cultural significance of theBritish capital in theRomantic period. JonKlancher discusses the 'cultural distinctiveness' ofRomantic cosmopolitanism, arguing thatdebates around the idea of the 'cosmopolis' were themselves a 'key mode' throughwhich the 'intellectual field'was restructured at this time (p. 79). JohnBarrell attempts tomap the locations ofLondon Corresponding Society meetings, exploring the rhetoric of those thatopposed the society in terms of their identification of both theLCS and London itself with monstrosity. In an illuminating essay on Blake, Sa ree Makdisi argues that thepoet's cosmopolitan radicalism needs tobe distinguished from theLockean heritage ofTom Paine, JohnHorne Tooke, and members of the LCS. Frances Ferguson's suggestive discussion of envy is themost loosely tied of the essays to the theme of the book: she examines the topos of envy in thework of Co leridge and Dickens and in theBenthamite educational tradition, speculating that its increased significance in such work was a function of the fact that social relationships (on which envy is founded) are necessarily more of a concern in the crowded streets of London than theymight be, say, on the under-populated hills near the Somerset village of Nether Stowey. Three of the essays are concerned with urban spectacle: Anne Bermingham argues that against the rejection of the cosmopolis as a subject for fine art,Ackermann's shop and his magazine, The Repository of theArts, pro vided a feminized and commercialized set of responses to theurban; lainMcCalman considers what he calls 'Rogue Romanticism' in the theatrical collaboration of the showman Alessandro di Cagliostro and the artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg; and Simon During gives a succinct account of the fortunes of a popular theatre, the Lyceum incentral London, and thevicissitudes of itsproductions in theperiod. Peter Manning provides a dramatic account of theconstruction of the figureof theRoman ticpoet through theurban scene of sometimes competing lecture series byColeridge and Hazlitt. And Anne Janowitz discusses the translation of the 'natural sublime' into MLR, I03.1, 2008 197 urban spaces by poets such asMary Robinson and Blake in theRomantic period and by JamesThomson ('B.V.') towards the end of thenineteenth century. One of thepurposes of thisdiverse series of essays iscollectively to redefineRoman ticism,both in termsof a canon and in termsof a set of values, interests, topoi, tropes, genres, and indeed media. As the editors remark, commenting onWordsworth but also implicitly on the largerproject of (canonical) Romanticism, 'themode hemarks as metropolitan [. . .] structures his work as, exactly, thatwhich is to be resisted' (p. i6). But the ambition of the editors and their contributors is also to go beyond...

The Sublimity of Violence

Kant identified in the “spectators’” enthusiastic response to the French Revolution the clear sign of a moral disposition in humankind. Following Hannah Arendt’s classic interpretation, but departing from it in important respects, I attempt to show in this paper that the “spectatorial” account of Kant’s view of the French Revolution makes sense only if it is understood in terms of a subject’s aesthetic response to objects of natural sublimity, and only if this aesthetic experience is instrumentalized for purposes of moral education.

A Estética do Invisível Na Natureza

This paper aims at showing the interdependence between aesthetic and ethic values in appreciating nature. The Kantian concept of sublime guides us in the first part, exhibiting the primacy of ethics over aesthetics, as the sublime reveals it self to be an analogon of the moral law and the respect due to it. The second part, based on the holistic tendency in Environmental Ethics hold by Holmes Rolston III and others, analyses how the relation is inverted by means of an aesthetic of the invisible, where the sublime in nature refers to the whole and is hidden under the apparent ugliness of the parts.

Spinoza in Schelling

This paper explores Schelling's life-long fascination with Spinoza. Through moments of ambivalence and enthusiasm, one aspect of latter's thought remains central for Schelling: intellectual intuition of God/Nature. While he consistently emphasizes non-objectifiable nature of intuition (as constituting ground of freedom), influence of Spinoza is still apparent in what Schelling calls Unvordenklichkeit des Seins. Freedom is a response to an ungroundable necessity that consciousness lives out of, but behind which it can never penetrate. This insight provokes a reading of Spinoza that departs from conventional rationalist interpretation and gestures to an a-theological, yet mystical, understanding, which awakens a feeling not only for sublime in nature, but for sublime that lies at the heart of what is. In ensuing silence of self, substance reveals itself as living spirit. Through this interpretation, Neoplatonic truth of Spinoza becomes visible.

Addison's Aesthetics of Novelty

Addison's Aesthetics of Novelty SCOTT BLACK The history of eighteenth-century British aesthetics has been written mainly as an explication of two terms, the beautiful and the sublime, with critics generally taking as their starting point Burke's disqualification of "novelty" as a separate category of analysis. Only recently have some begun to account for the historical fact of this category before the Enquiry (1757).' In this paper I examine "novelty," not to correct Burke or to defend the pleasures of novelty, but to offer an account of its significance as one of three terms—great, beautiful, novel—in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712).21 argue that novelty is the central category of the "Pleasures," offering a self-reflection of both the Spectator itself and the dynamics of the civil society that the periodical essay was instrumental in articulating.3 For the last sixty years, Addison has been read as a precursor of the romantic sublime.4 Clarence DeWitt Thorpe (1937) concludes his study of novelty by saying that Addison helped "open the way to . . . phases of romantic critical philosophy," while Robin Dix more recently (1986) suggests that the category was a starting point for attitudes that were "more firmly established, and more fully developed, by the Romantic theorists."5 Neil Saccamano challenges the teleology of the sublime that underwrites such work, offering instead a discussion of the sublime's "logic" and "dy269 270 / BLACK namics" in the "Pleasures."6 For all the rigor with which he resists the telos of a sublime history, though, Saccamano structures his account by its terms, reading Addison with reference to Burke: "Unlike Burke, Addison neither defines a distinct aesthetic pleasure (delight) to cover this negative category [fear], nor considers terror the predominant sublime pleasure."7 But what Addison didn't do does not fully explain what he did do, and what he did do is perhaps best understood by entertaining his own terms. For instance , Saccamano says "the 'pleasing Astonishment' felt in surveying the infinite universe after reading the 'Theories' of 'the new Philosophy'" is "one of the moments entitling the 'Pleasures' to its place in histories of the Kantian natural sublime."8 In the paper to which this refers (S #420), Addison does write of things that will be explained by the sublime, but I don't think he writes of them in sublime terms: "The Understanding, indeed, opens an infinite Space on every side of us, but the Imagination, after a few faint efforts, is immediately at a stand and finds her self swallowed up in the immensity of the Void that surrounds us" (S, 3:576). Addison's response to this gap between the understanding and imagination is to wonder if the reason for "this Defect of Imagination" might be that there is not enough "room in the Brain for such variety of Impressions" (S, 3:577)—an empirical question that refers to a Lockean problematic. The sublime offers one model of reflection, but not the only one in the history of eighteenth-century aesthetic thinking. Discussing an example of Locke's imagery of the infinite, Jules David Law notes "there is no aesthetics of the sublime here; the sensation of failure (constitutive of the 'confused' comparative idea or the attempt to comprehend the negative as a positive idea) does not present itself as a dramatic solution to the tension between the knowable and the unknowable. We might say that the difference between Locke on the one hand and Burke or Kant on the other is that Locke refuses to thematize failure."91 think something similar is going on in Addison's explicitly Lockean aesthetics. Law describes such "empiricist reflection" as "a self-critical procedure, in which perpetual correction and revision (of impressions, of language, and of judgments) are more important that the establishing of permanent categories or conditions of knowledge."10 This equally describes the method of essay writing, and I argue that Addison develops the category of novelty in order to explain the effects of the essay. Novelty theorizes the pleasures of essays, and this offers an alternative to an aesthetics organized by the sublime. Michael McKeon has argued that aesthetics emerged as a field...

Le sublime et les limites du sensible. Perception scientifique et subjectivité esthétique chez Addison et Kant

Daniel Dumouchel : The sublime and the limits of sensibility. Scientific perception in addison and Kant. We here emphasize certain aspects of the 18th-century relationship between scientific and philosophical discourse on aesthetics, by concentrating on the question of the sublime. This article insists on two crucial theoretical approaches to the sublime in nature, that of Joseph Addison in his essays on 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' (1712) and that of Immanuel Kant in his Theory of the Heavens (1755) and Critique of Judgement (1790).

Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist

Caroline A. Jones. Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. In this vigorous, ambitious book Caroline Jones describes recent, periodizing shift in the way that people have conceived of artists' studios. This shift-one that divides the 1950s from the 1960s-is the studio's change from the site of solitary, Abstract Expressionist ritual to space increasingly defined by technological and antihumanist metaphors. The most enduring image of the Abstract Expressionist studio comes to us through Hans Namuth's film and photographs of Jackson Pollock's isolated and wholly absorbed dance of painting, in which Pollock's Easthampton studio registers as sacred wilderness. By contrast, the diverse practices of the 1960sthe real subject of this book-refuse comprehensive images such as Namuth's representations of Pollock. Jones thus selects three artists more or less from the mainstream of the 1960s: Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson. These are good choices. Through these three individuals we see the studio in various incarnations: as business overseen by executive artist Stella; as Factory managed by Warhol; and as the space of modernism from which Smithson emerges-escapes!-into the mature phase of his career. Stella, Warhol, and Smithson share what Jones terms, after Leo Marx, the rhetoric of the technological sublime. All three artists are partial to industrial materials and methods of production, particularly seriality. The technological sublime is invoked with regard to these artists in order to contrast it with the natural sublime of Abstract Expressionists Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. Stella's particular mode of technological sublimity is iconic in his desire for his monochrome stripe paintings to function as, in his words, a kind of visual imprint...a rubber stamp (156) that can be perceived in glance. Jones pointedly reproduces Stella's 1963 hexagonal painting Sidney Guberman alongside the 1960 octagonal logo for the Chase Manhattan bank. By contrast, Warhol's flirtation with the technological sublime is more profoundly performative, as exemplified by his habit of insisting that his work had been made by assistants Brigid [Polk] or Gerard [Malanga]. Finally, Jones reads Smithson's writings, and dispersed works such as the site/nonsite pieces, as means for radically restructuring sublimity that had been manifestly thematized in his earlier work. The strengths of Machine in the Studio are numerous. In addition to the compelling larger narrative, particularly of value is the subtle and unexpected underscoring of continuities between Stella and Warhol. Jones isolates but never overstates these points. Stella and Warhol share maddening ambivalence in their frequent metaphors of labor and management, and of industry and post-industry. Stella is at one and the same time house painter, using the workaday skills of his onetime job, and executive, delineating and overseeing production. For Warhol, the oscillation is between the studio as Factory and as art business. …

The Scientific Education and Technological Imagination of Emily Dickinson

The Scientific Education and Technological Imagination of Emily Dickinson Marianne Erickson (bio) (for Rowena Revis Jones, who couldn't join us at Innsbruck) In 1932, when Waldo Frank claimed that Emily Dickinson "based her explosive doubts upon the permanent premise of a sheltered private garden, to which she could always meditatively retire" (x), it is doubtful that he envisioned a machine in that pastoral New England Eden. Nevertheless, close readings of selected Dickinson poems and letters, considered along with what we know of her education, suggest that Dickinson was not only aware of, but positively influenced by nineteenth-century progress in science and technology. Dickinson presents a vision more scientific than sublime in a number of her writings, among them the tongue-in-cheek "microscope" poem, #185. "Faith" is a fine inventionWhen Gentlemen can see—But Microscopes are prudentIn an Emergency. (c. 1860) The poet tells us, effectively, that she approaches her crisis of faith not with blind credulity but with scientific skepticism. Much has been said about the sublime elements in Dickinson's poetry. As we shall see, her technological imagination is considerable as well. Dickinson's birth in Amherst, Massachusetts on December 10, 1830 coincides with the year in which American inventor Robert L. Stevens invented the modern railroad rail: an invention that would significantly change the American landscape of the nineteenth century. Dickinson was [End Page 45] educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke, until terminating her formal studies in 1848. During her seven years at Amherst Academy, she studied Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin, Botany, Ecclesiastical History, Algebra, Euclid, and that brand new science, Electricity. Her biographer G. F. Whicher gives the following assessment of the poet's early education: Mathematics, it is only too evident, was merely a hurdle to be surmounted in order to qualify for the Seminary. The "Mental Philosophy" recited by a girl of fifteen from Upham's manual cannot be taken seriously, nor can her acquaintance with Ecclesiastical History be supposed to have been more than perfunctory. The sciences, however, enlisted her interest, and her work in English composition called out her best powers. (47) At Mount Holyoke, under the tutelage of Mary Lyon, whom Dickinson's classmates nicknamed "the old she-dragon" (Whicher 64), the poet had the opportunity to develop her acute mental powers yet further, studying Ancient History, Chemistry, Physiology, Astronomy, Natural Philosophy, and yet more Algebra. An interesting trend in the mid-nineteenth century gave Dickinson the advantage of being excused from Botany, "in view of her proficiency in that subject" (Whicher 69). Young New England ladies of the time were wont to keep herbaria, a hobby to which Dickinson often alludes in her letters to Abiah Root. This obviously influenced her store of botanical knowledge to a marked degree; enough that Mount Holyoke's faculty considered her sufficiently versed in the subject to waive the Botany requirement. Shortly after the 1866 publication of poem #986, one of only three published during Dickinson's lifetime, Samuel Bowles commented on the poet's unlikely familiarity with agricultural matters. Dickinson writes of the snake, "He likes a Boggy Acre / A Floor too cool for Corn," to which Bowles replies, "How did that girl ever know that a boggy field wasn't good for corn?" Samuel Bowles's editorial has been preserved in the Dickinson annals (Whicher 118) and reminds us that her knowledge of botany was, indeed, quite extraordinary for a nineteenth century woman. Later, in poem 1775, we see Dickinson's appreciation of the pollination process. With a typical Dickinsonian twist, she adds "revery;" her salute to the sublime in nature. To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,One clover, and a bee,And revery.The revery alone will do,If bees are few. (Date unknown) [End Page 46] Similarly, she describes the unusual ornithophagology of the hummingbird as an elaborate meal, replete with music, in poem 500. Within my Garden, rides a BirdUpon a Single Wheel—Whose spokes a dizzy Music makeAs 'twere a travelling Mill— He never stops, but slackensAbove the Ripest Rose—Partakes without alightingAnd praises as he goes, Till every spice is tasted—And then...

The picturesque and the sublime in nature and the landscape: writing and iconography in the romantic voyaging in the Alps

The culture of romanticism gave new meaning to the concepts sublime and picturesque as applied to nature, making of them typical attributes of landscape. A privileged field of application of these concepts were mountains, in general, and the Alps, in particular, which in those times became favorite places of travel and sejourn. Typical product of this esthetical-cultural convergence was the ‘picturesque voyage’ in the Alps, large volumes containing artistic designs (etchings) in which motives of the picturesque dominate, 3ccompanied by descriptive vignettes. Several ‘picturesque voyages’ into the central Alps are examined, and the iconographic and literary contents of these accounts are assessed.

American Technological Sublime by David E. Nye

Book Reviews American Technological Sublime. By David E. Nye. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Pp. xx + 362; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Nearly twenty years ago John Kasson, following hints by Perry Miller and Leo Marx, offered a brief discussion of the “technological sublime.” Suggesting that technology had offered Americans “a wel­ come source of excitement, an addition [to] but not a fundamental dis­ ruption of the natural order,” Kasson concluded that “to explore fully a subject as large as this one would require a book in itself” (Civilizing the Machine [1976], p. 174). David E. Nye has now responded to that challenge with a provocative, conceptually wide-ranging study reveal­ ing how Americans since the early 19th century have experienced awe­ inspiring new technologies and integrated them into a national identity that was initially more inspired by nature and nature’s God than by hu­ man artifice. The central paradox posed by American Technological Sub­ lime appears to great effect in ajacket photograph (unfortunately not reproduced within an otherwise generously illustrated book) that fore­ grounds three men looking out from a precipice over a vast mountain­ ous landscape in the midst of which towers the massive reinforcedconcrete structure ofBoulder Dam. It is unclear whether they are awed by nature’s overwhelming sublimity or by humanity’s awesome power, or perhaps, as engineers, filled with a sense oftheir own unprecedented power over both nature and humanity. Some of the material in this book will be familiar to readers of Nye’s previous work, Electrifying America (1990), which contained a section on the “electrical sublime” created by the engineers who illu­ minated international expositions and the “Great White Ways” of cities and towns at the turn of the century. But here Nye moves beyond a monographic concern with a particular technology to ana­ lyze various modes of response to the most spectacular technologies the nation has generated and absorbed during its history. In addition to electricity he focuses on the railroad offering the unprecedented experience of speed while spanning a continent, the technically and visually innovative Eads and Brooklyn Bridges, towering skyscrapers and their empowering panoramas, massively scaled and intricately detailed assembly-line factories (visible to tourists on site and to expo­ sition visitors viewing full-scale models), and, more recently, the Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 1021 1022 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE atomic bomb (with its genuinely apocalyptic terror) and the space launch (embodying a nostalgia for past certainty as it reconfirms be­ lief in human control of technology). As initially formulated by Edmund Burke in 1756, the aesthetic category of the sublime encompasses an emotional reaction to a natu­ ral phenomenon or landscape so awe-inspiring as to render an ob­ server speechless before its nearly terrifying transcendence of ordi­ nary reality. After describing straightforward Burkean reactions to such wonders of nature as Niagara Falls, Nye uses a discussion of the railroad to distinguish the “American technological sublime” from Burke’s natural sublime. The primary differences are an emphasis on dynamic motion (in addition to grand scale) and, especially sig­ nificant for a new democracy, the fact that crowds of Americans could share experiences created by national endeavor. It was no accident that the nation typically dedicated its most impressive engineering works, such as canals and bridges, on the Fourth of July. According to Nye, the technological sublime not only “conflated the preservation and the transformation of the natural world” (p. 37); it also “trans­ formed the individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness” (p. 43). American Technological Sublime is the most complex and rewarding in a distinguished thirty-year tradition of general works exploring the tangled relationship of technology and culture in the United States. Even so, the ambitious scope of Nye’s undertaking almost guarantees a few problems. Moving forward to the present, he would like to argue that the technological sublime has become a matter of mere representation no longer connected to any technology in which a democratic people share real power. Some readers might conclude that the book’s final sections, addressing the rededication of the Statue...

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty by Robert Friedel

1022 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE atomic bomb (with its genuinely apocalyptic terror) and the space launch (embodying a nostalgia for past certainty as it reconfirms be­ lief in human control of technology). As initially formulated by Edmund Burke in 1756, the aesthetic category of the sublime encompasses an emotional reaction to a natu­ ral phenomenon or landscape so awe-inspiring as to render an ob­ server speechless before its nearly terrifying transcendence of ordi­ nary reality. After describing straightforward Burkean reactions to such wonders of nature as Niagara Falls, Nye uses a discussion of the railroad to distinguish the “American technological sublime” from Burke’s natural sublime. The primary differences are an emphasis on dynamic motion (in addition to grand scale) and, especially sig­ nificant for a new democracy, the fact that crowds of Americans could share experiences created by national endeavor. It was no accident that the nation typically dedicated its most impressive engineering works, such as canals and bridges, on the Fourth of July. According to Nye, the technological sublime not only “conflated the preservation and the transformation of the natural world” (p. 37); it also “trans­ formed the individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness” (p. 43). American Technological Sublime is the most complex and rewarding in a distinguished thirty-year tradition of general works exploring the tangled relationship of technology and culture in the United States. Even so, the ambitious scope of Nye’s undertaking almost guarantees a few problems. Moving forward to the present, he would like to argue that the technological sublime has become a matter of mere representation no longer connected to any technology in which a democratic people share real power. Some readers might conclude that the book’s final sections, addressing the rededication of the Statue of Liberty and the recently constructed attractions of Las Vegas, stretch Nye’s definition of the technological sublime to the breaking point, however much they might expose the evaporation of democratic experience. Even so, this is an impressive work, exhaus­ tively researched and elegantly written, that continually rewards thoughtful attention as it presents nothing less than a new synthesis of the meaning of technology in American culture. Jeffrey L. Meikle Dr. Meikle is professor of American studies and art history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is American Plastic: A Cultural History (Rutgers University Press, 1995). Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty. By Robert Friedel. New York: Nor­ ton, 1994. Pp. xiv + 288; illustrations, notes, index. $23.00. The zipper is such a common feature of life today that we take it for granted. But no compelling need, no technological imperative, no great social or political ambition drove us to zip our coats and TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1023 jeans. (Significantly, the device has no workable generic name in the language—it is not the slide fastener, it is the zipper.) As Robert Friedel notes early on in his study of this exemplary device, “buttons already worked.” It took nearly thirty years for society to decide that it needed the zipper, and the story of why it did carries Friedel’s book beyond the commonplaces of technological history. The zipper limped along for decades searching not only for a mar­ ket but for a place in consciousness. As engineers worked to improve on Whitcomb Judson’s 1893 idea, its promoters also searched for an appropriate name to replace the original “C-curity,” trying out and rejecting a variety of catchy monikers from Plako to Hookless. It was not until B. F. Goodrich Rubber put the number four model on galoshes that the name Zipper was invented. Even then, the name that today has the ring of inevitability was applied to the rubber boots, not the device that closed them. And not until 1937 did the breakthrough come for zippers in cloth­ ing. The Prince of Wales, soon to be king, and not much later to be Duke of Windsor, was much publicized when he wore a suit with a zipper. Around the same time, Elsa Schiaparelli made colored zippers part of fashion. James Thurber abetted in the marketing of the device by providing...

Mallarmé and the Sublime by Louis Wirth Marvick

B ook R eview s Louis Wirth Marvick. M a lla rm é a n d th e Sublim e. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Pp. xiii +211. Paper $14.95, cloth $39.50. Long in the shadows, the sublime is again the focus of critical debate. Louis Wirth Marvick ’s study is certain to figure prominently in this revival. Analyzing the sublime as both an exalted attitude towards the ideal and a rhetorical device, Marvick shows its continuing importance in Mallarmé’s revolutionary poetics. While the study is divided into two parts, the first presenting a general theory of the sublime, the second establishing its specific relevance to Mallarmé, aesthetic theory and literary criticism are happily wed throughout. In part one, Marvick examines the diverse treatment of the sublime in the writings of Longinus, Johnson, Dennis, Coleridge, and Burke. The changing criteria for what con­ stitutes sublimity is explained as a “ function of the balance or imbalance of the motives of irony and enthusiasm” characterizing the subject’s relation to the ideal (p. 22). The percep­ tion of the ideal (the sublime object) as real takes the form variously of stylistic modera­ tion, the imperative to silence, or untempered expressions of enthusiasm. For Mallarmé, the ideal cannot be represented because it does not exist. But instead of reducing him to silence, his belief in the nothingness and ineffability of the ideal engenders “a principle of (aesthetic) faith” (p. 41). We are shown how Mallarmé engages in a persistently ironic poetics that enthusiastically articulates what cannot be named. Especially admirable in this study is Marvick’s rigorously formal yet flexible approach. While the varying concepts of the sublime are deduced from a meticulous analysis of their expression through rhetorical figures, the effect of these figures is in turn evaluated with an eye toward the (not necessarily encoded) historical circumstances in which they are received. These may determine whether hyperbole, for example, is actually felt as exaggera­ tion—as a departure from the truth. To complete his explication of the philosophical structure of the sublime, Marvick sum­ marizes its three stages as presented in Kant’s Analytic o f the Sublime. When the subject becomes overwhelmed by an object too great or too powerful to imagine, abstract reason­ ing supplies for its comprehension a still greater notion such as that of infinity. In this turn­ ing on itself, the mind gains superiority over its object, finding the “ ‘absolutely great only in the proper estate of the Subject’ ” (p. 66). To show that Kant’s analysis of the experience of the sublime in nature is applicable to the experience of literary texts, Marvick convincingly demonstrates how its terms may be converted into the language of Jakobson and Saussure. With the difference that Mallarmé’s obscure rhetoric does not allow the reader to abandon his object (i.e., the signifier.? that make up the text), Mallarmé’s poetic practice, in Marvick’s view, validates the Kantian model of the sublime. The poet’s use of praeteritio, of oxymorons, of phrases such as “ les étoiles à midi,” which constitute images as much as “ imponderable abstraction[s]” (p. 137), requires that the reader exercise his “capacities for ironic perception and enthusiastic participation simultaneously” (p. 135), While the body of literary exegesis in part two per­ tains to the passages where the word “sublime” actually occurs in Mallarmé’s prose, Mar­ vick also suggests how an understanding of Mallarmé’s concept of the sublime would bear fruit in a study of his poems. Because it contributes much to our knowledge of the history of the sublime as well as elucidating its on-going vitality within Mallarmé’s avant-garde texts, this work will be of special interest to comparatists in the field of aesthetics and to Mallarmé scholars alike. M ary L fw is Shaw Rutgers University Vol.XXVII, No. 4 105 ...

Space, Deity, and the “Natural Sublime”

Space, Deity, and the “Natural Sublime”