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

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.