Reinventing The Sublime

Examines the return of the sublime in post-modernity, and at intimations of a 'post-Romantic' sublime in Romanticism itself. This work looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and post-modern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history.

This revised edition of Carolyn Merchant’s classic Reinventing Eden has been updated with a new foreword and afterword. Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western Culture. This book traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations and offers a bold new way to think about the earth.

Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson), and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms 'postoperas'. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies. That dissection shows how the singing body acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera’s meanings.

Related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists and has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. In this thoroughly updated edition, Philip Shaw looks at: Early modern and post-Romantic conceptions of the sublime in two brand new chapters The legacy of the earliest classical theories, through those of the long eighteenth century to modernist, postmodernist and avant-garde conceptions of the sublime Critical Introductions to major theorists of the sublime such as Longinus, Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan and Žižek The significance of the concept through a range of literary readings, including the Old and New Testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the Romantic period to the present day How the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch’s neo-noir The influence of the sublime on recent debates in the fields of politics, theology and psychoanalysis. Offering historical overviews and explanations, this remarkably clear study is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory.

Pairs literary works with philosophical and theoretical texts to examine how the Kantian sublime influenced authors in their treatments of freedom and subjectivity throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Legacies of the Sublime offers a highly original, subtle, and persuasive account of the aesthetics of the sublime in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and science. Christopher Kitson reveals the neglected history of how Kant’s theory of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment cast a shadow over the next century and more of literature and thought. In each chapter, close readings weave together literary works with philosophical and scientific ones in order to clarify the complex dialogues between them. Through these readings, Kitson shows how the sublime survived well after the heyday of romanticism as a way of representing human freedom. This new context produces fresh interpretations of canonical literary works, by Thomas Carlyle, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce, with reference to important theoretical texts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Kitson follows the sublime’s various manifestations and mutations, through the nineteenth century’s industrial grandeur and the vertiginous prospects of deep time, into the early twentieth century’s darkly ironic and uncanny versions. A welcome contribution to the study of the long nineteenth century, this work reveals an unexamined chapter in intellectual history and in the story of the modern self. “Kitson is well versed in the theory of the sublime and demonstrates detailed knowledge and understanding of primary texts and contexts. His close readings of key passages contribute to a richly textured, persuasive argument.” — Philip Shaw, author of The Sublime

Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.