Understanding Thomas Weiskels The Romantic Sublime :: Essays Papers

Understanding Thomas Weiskels The Romantic SublimeIn order to find out Weiskels argument on the terrific, it would be helpful to briefly review the important treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Immanuel Kant and Edmund. Longinus understands the sublime as intrinsically colligate to linguistics, as being achieved mainly by means of language and literature. The linguistic sublime causes one to transcend oneself. When one perceives an finger as producing ecstasy, he asserts, that experience can be considered sublime. According to Longinus, this effect can be achieved through powerful magniloquence he then examines the sublime nature of the rhetoric of many great writers, including Homer and Sappho. He also considers the sublime to survive in political oration, theorizing those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardor and as it were illumining our path, pull up stakes carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of subliminity which be with in us (84). Longinus cautions, however, that writers who strive to achieve sublimity often fail, instead creating expressions . . . which argon not sublime but high-flown (77). He further elaborates that it is nearly impossible for the common writer to achieve sublimity through rhetoric, stating that, While tumidity desires to transcend the limits of the sublime, the defect which is termed puerility is the direct antithesis of elevation. Writers easily fall object to this error, Longinus explains While they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected (77). Longinus theory focuses mainly on a sublime that results from a thing or event that possesses somewhat type of positive literary effect. For Longinus, one is uplifted by the reliable sublime . . . filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard (78). Edmund Burke, alternatively, makes a distinction between what is beaut iful (and pleasant) and the sublime, concluding that an experience that might be considered terrible may instead inspire a peculiar adept of pleasure, a delight derived from holy terror. It is Burkes opinion that human experience with a electronegative connotation tends to stimulate the sublime. Burke proposes that the sublime is whatever is fitted in any sieve to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . any sort terrible, or is conversant to the highest degree terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror (36). Burkes sublime is achieved through a type of indirect or derived terror, in which one experiences pleasure in the face of pain or terror.