Pop Aesthetics of 1750

[koganbot]

OK, here I am at the UConn library, raring to do some last-minute research

dubdobdee says here:

It travels because, however newly named, it's one of the golden oldies in aesthetics — the phenomenon of the Sublime, that combo frisson of awe, fright, satisfaction and pleasure, which stopped being avant garde about a quarter of a millennium ago, round about the time Edmund Burke said, "A clear idea is another name for a little idea", while all around edgy folks swooned before the immensity or violence or dreadfulness of chasms, volcanoes, stormclouds and shadows; and Hugh Walpole — on a forests-and-mountains walking tour in the Alps — got to see his beloved pet poodle being gobbled up by a wolf.

All right, clearly if I am to understand the decade in pop, I will need someone to tell me in what essay, book, or broadside I can find various people - Edmund Burke, Hugh Walpole, Kara Dioguardi, not to mention whoever wrote the idea when it was still avant garde - putting forth the theory of the Romantic Sublime. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is rather taciturn on the subject.

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I see you hiding Kara up in there. I believe the broadside where you can find her is called "my Livejournal."

The Burke line is from this, btw.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Disregard that last link, I meant to link to this. (Full work is a href="http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/">here.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I fail at commenting.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I fail at dogfacts: it was not a poodle but a King Charles spaniel, named "Tory"!

Longinus on the sublime: is the classical root of the whole idea

Burke on the Sublime

Secondary essay on Burke on the Sublime: I love the "Victorian Web"

Secondary essay on Ruskin on the sublime: Ruskin is probably who did most to get the idea into the general discussion; the most important writer on art and politics in the English language in the 19th century (i mean that's how they saw him)

re the romantic sublime specifically

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

longinus is the "classical" sublime -- not the classical that comes before the romantic in the 18th century, which was a revival, but the original classical, which of course never referred to itself as that....

ruskin is arguably the "post romantic sublime: not sure what the correct term would be here, but his arguments and his position i think move somewhat away from the line taken by eg the romantic poets in their poems and criticism -- wordsworth, coleridge, keats, hazlitt who isn't a poet but is the first "modern" critic-as-essayist; though keats and wordsworth diverge quite a bit... i'd have to hunt around to recall how...

burke i thnk would be the theorist of the "romantic sublime" when it was avant garde; longinus of the unqualified sublime, the first to discuss it... and he's the one i was talking about in that fragment

Re: re the romantic sublime specifically

[koganbot]

Much thanks to Mark and Erika. Now I doubt that I'll have time to read what you linked, but I'll probably do a quick skim. Disappointed by the Burke contention, since it isn't distinguishing between what is awesome and what feels awesome. I also think he's flat-out wrong in his contention about "clear ideas being little ideas," since a novel idea that is nonetheless clear idea is more likely to have MASSIVE consequences than one that's unclear, assuming that the former is genuinely novel and consequetial, of course. (I'm thinking of Special Relativity as being a novel idea - or somewhat novel (it's a variation on Galileo, but a way of getting rid of an unnoticed contradiction when you apply Galileo's idea to the speed of light) - that is also clear. And "postmodernism" as an example of an idea that is unclear. Also the Kogan use of the metaphor "PBS" strikes me as unclear, but valuable, but more likely to be consequential if it can be made clearer, so that stupid people will not so easily project stupid ideas of their own onto it.)

Re: re the romantic sublime specifically

[koganbot]

I did not proofread that before I hit "submit." Bad Frank.