What Is the Sublime?
Ecologies of Emptiness, Aesthetics, and the Visual Arts
What Is the Sublime?
Ecologies of Emptiness, Aesthetics, and the Visual Arts
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Description
An elaboration on the concept of the sublime that both clarifies the historical confusion, and offers recourse to the compulsion that characterizes our contemporary lives.
The sublime has been an elusive concept since its introduction by Longinus. No one seems to agree on a definition of the term; neither the idealists (Burke, Kant), nor the modernists (Barnett Newman), nor the postmodernists (Lyotard). 'Sublime moments' reveal the unobscured, undistracted, and unselfconscious nature of our minds-free of worry, anxiety, and fear. This describes what, in Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, is called emptiness (sunyata)-the genuine, underlying nature of who we are. Christopher Huck elaborates on this concept through a dialectical inquiry into the now-classic Burke-Kant sublime, which is grounded in either a notion of fear (Burke), or of something too vast to take in, but still somehow subject to rational containment (Kant). Huck demonstrates his view of the 'empty-sublime' through a revivification of the aesthetic experience which provokes and illuminates art's potential as expressive of the empty-sublime experience, evidenced in the work of visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Wolfgang Laib. These artists exemplify art that emerges from a space of vividness, clarity, and unselfconscious openness; that is to say, a lucid emptiness.
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Table of Contents
PREFACE
ACKNOWEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART I: Sublime Beginnings
1. Longinus, Peri hupsous, and the Sublime in Antiquity
2. Basilios Bessarion and the (Re)discovery of Peri hupsous
3. The Sublime in Renaissance Europe and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's Traitè
4. “Steal My Thunder!”: John Dennis and the Sublime's Swerve into Theistic Passions and Terrors
5. The Sublime Through the Lens of Eighteenth-Century British Critics
6. Kant: The Final Arbiter of the Sublime?
7. Incoherencies, Fallacies, and Parallel Readings: Arguments Against Modern Theories of the Sublime (Sircello and Forsey)
PART II: Je ne sais quoi as Sunyata: An Inquiry into Two Parallel Theses (or, The Reality of Non-Existence)
8. Is Sunyata (Emptiness) the Key to the Sublime?
9. Parallel Readings: Discourses on the Sublime, Discourses on Sunyata
10. Nihilism, Eternalism, and Sunyata: The Middle Way Between Extremes
10.1: The Long Debate Beginning with Parmenides
11. The Dialectic of Nihilism and Emptiness
11.1. Heidegger and das Nichts
11.2. Sartre and le néant
PART III: Sunyata, the Sublime, and the Visual Arts
12. The (Re)emergence of the Sublime in Post-World War II New York: The Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s
13. Danto, Newman, and Rothko: The Modern/Postmodern Sublime
14. Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Wolfgang Laib
14.1. Agnes Martin: Sublimely Unemphatic
14.2. Robert Rauschenberg: “I try to act in that gap…”
14.3. Wolfgang Laib: “There is no beginning and no ending…”
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Product details
| Published | Jan 21 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 9781978759923 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 19 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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