Understanding Thomas Weiskels The Romantic Sublime :: Essays Papers

Understanding Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime In order to understand Weiskel's argument on the sublime, it would be helpful to briefly review the influential treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Immanuel Kant and Edmund. Longinus understands the sublime as intrinsically related to linguistics, as being achieved mainly through language and literature. The "linguistic sublime" causes one to transcend oneself. When one perceives an experience as producing ecstasy, he asserts, that experience can be considered sublime. According to Longinus, this effect can be achieved through powerful rhetoric; he then examines the sublime nature of the rhetoric of many great writers, including Homer and Sappho. He also considers the sublime to exist in political oration, theorizing "those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardor and as it were illumining our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of subliminity which are within us" (84). Longinus cautions, however, that writers who strive to achieve sublimity often fail, instead creating "expressions . . . which are 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 prey to this error, Longinus explains: "[W]hile 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 some type of positive literary effect. For Longinus, one is "uplifted by the true 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 beautiful (and pleasant) and the sublime, concluding that an experience that might be considered terrible may instead inspire a peculiar sense of pleasure, a delight derived from terror. It is Burke's opinion that human experience with a negative connotation tends to stimulate the sublime. Burke proposes that the sublime is "[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror" (36). Burke's sublime is achieved through a type of indirect or derived terror, in which one experiences pleasure in the face of pain or terror.