The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom)

I thoroughly enjoyed this stroll through history with an eye towards the sublime. Professor Shaw manages to keeps you right there on the threshold.

Dorothy Wordsworth, in Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, wrote of Coleridge's meeting of a tourist at a waterfall. The tourist described the waterfall as "majestic... sublime and beautiful." After reading Philip Shaw's detailed history of The Sublime, it becomes clear why Coleridge was so upset by the tourist's description. At the time, the sublime and the beautiful were thought of as correlatives, engendered as masculine and feminine, respectively. How could a waterfall be both? Shaw addresses this yin-yang phenomenon in his excellent study of the progression of thinking about the sublime, from the first-century Greek philosopher Dionysius Longinus, through eighteenth-century thinkers including Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the Romantics Coleridge and Wordsworth, and culminating with "postmodern" critics such as Lyotard and Derrida. His explicit goal in writing this book is to show how the theories of different periods of culture, literature, and critical thinking differ from each other. Not one to be impressed by contemporary philosophy, I was pleasantly surprised at the clarity of thought I encountered in reading the postmodern arguments. However Shaw points out that, building upon the negative approach posited by Kant (that we can only know the immensity of the universe by knowing what we do not know), the postmoderns have developed a concept of the sublime as the correlative lack of something. Yet when the postmoderns uncoupled themselves from the Judeo-Christian tradition, in effect they created the lack of something; then they turned around and mourned the loss of it. CS Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, comments on the authors of a textbook (the "Green Book") who argued that the waterfall could not be sublime in itself, that the tourist was merely expressing his feelings about it. Yet Coleridge was claiming that the object was something which merited those emotions. Surely something has gone missing from the time that Coleridge stood at the waterfall to the present-day thinking as seen in the "Green Book." In his first chapter (appropriately entitled "Men Without Chests") Lewis writes that "it is by this middle element [emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments] that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal." The way that we think about the sublime, as exemplified over different periods of Western culture, may be equated with "this middle element." In other words it is how we regard the sublime that makes us what we are. Shaw portrays the sublime in terms of the culture which represents it, but all the while he says it eludes definition. Instead it is our very way of looking at the sublime that defines us. It could be said that Wordsworth and Coleridge stood at the very pinnacle of thinking regarding the sublime. Where does that leave the postmoderns? The authors of the "Green Book" seem to have swept the sublime under the carpet.

An excellent critical survey on the key literature on the sublime. Very well written, clear and sensitive. The comparative study gives a new perspective on this theme. Trained philosophers and anyone interested in the subject may enjoy this very useful book.