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You can say what you want about "the Sublime." Edmund Burke has.
http://www.carleton.ca/philosophy/cusjp/v20/n1/magrini.html
And in a more Kantian, POMO-Mode:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-1554874/H-P-Lovecraft-and-the.html
I myself don't find those sublimities particularly satisfying. I'm more interested in a Levi-Straussian sublime (hmmm...best not to google that, you'll get this:
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-matrix.htm
)...Anyway, don't consider yourself forewarned: in the search for the Sublime, anything can happen.
I like my sublime a bit more formally done. Call me picky, but if you have to metaphorically go snorkling in the abyss to have a sublime arty experience...what's the point?
For me, a little idle leafing through a soothing stretch of text is about as much gearing up to tackle the formless awful stuff as I want to do. Fortunately, though, there I was, leafing through Norman Austin's Archery in the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer's Odyssey when I found a mysterious phrase at the end of chapter two: "Prehistory is nobody's childhood." No, indeed, it's a rough world out there, or back then. Better the perspicacity of the anthropologist than the myopia of Penelope's suitors on Ithaka ( as Austin almost says at that point.). And this is one (rather poetic) way that Austin justifies reading the Odyssey as if it all made abundant sense.
Well...who would say: Prehistory is nobody's childhood? Levi-Strauss as it turns out, though not in a context I could retrieve from Austin's notes.
Austin's book on the Odyssey came out in 1975, which seems to have been about the peak of structuralism's impact on Lit Crit in the US. Austin's formalist book is haunted from one end to the other by structuralism. And this may be instructive. It seems to me that formalism (and Homeric formulae) was never the same after Levi-Strauss. Ever after Levi-Strauss, the formal interpretation is haunted by the kind of duplicative meanings that structuralist analysis reveals in any formal arrangement. When you think about it, there now seems to be a kind of inevitablility in the removal of meaning from the impulse to formalize and the expansion of meaning into the arena where some agency has to traverse the formalized object or text to make sense of it.
In Levi-Straussian terms, once the (Levi-Straussian) perception or myth of the propagation of the signifier (I'm going on my memory of Levi-Strauss's intro to Mauss' Essay on the Gift) becomes imaginable -- that is once we have the technology to imagine/ or visualize or even catalog the explosion of signifiers (from the dawn of language to the present photogenic moment), the idea of the "formal" is never the same. The purely formal is always haunted by a possibility of being read or traversed or transcribed or recorded in some way that restructures it...or in Lacanian terms...always subject to being recataloged into the immense cornucopia of the imaginary desire of the Other. And the sign of that is always something not-quite formalizable: the voice or the gaze.
http://www.carleton.ca/philosophy/cusjp/v20/n1/magrini.html
And in a more Kantian, POMO-Mode:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-1554874/H-P-Lovecraft-and-the.html
I myself don't find those sublimities particularly satisfying. I'm more interested in a Levi-Straussian sublime (hmmm...best not to google that, you'll get this:
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-matrix.htm
)...Anyway, don't consider yourself forewarned: in the search for the Sublime, anything can happen.
I like my sublime a bit more formally done. Call me picky, but if you have to metaphorically go snorkling in the abyss to have a sublime arty experience...what's the point?
For me, a little idle leafing through a soothing stretch of text is about as much gearing up to tackle the formless awful stuff as I want to do. Fortunately, though, there I was, leafing through Norman Austin's Archery in the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer's Odyssey when I found a mysterious phrase at the end of chapter two: "Prehistory is nobody's childhood." No, indeed, it's a rough world out there, or back then. Better the perspicacity of the anthropologist than the myopia of Penelope's suitors on Ithaka ( as Austin almost says at that point.). And this is one (rather poetic) way that Austin justifies reading the Odyssey as if it all made abundant sense.
Well...who would say: Prehistory is nobody's childhood? Levi-Strauss as it turns out, though not in a context I could retrieve from Austin's notes.
Austin's book on the Odyssey came out in 1975, which seems to have been about the peak of structuralism's impact on Lit Crit in the US. Austin's formalist book is haunted from one end to the other by structuralism. And this may be instructive. It seems to me that formalism (and Homeric formulae) was never the same after Levi-Strauss. Ever after Levi-Strauss, the formal interpretation is haunted by the kind of duplicative meanings that structuralist analysis reveals in any formal arrangement. When you think about it, there now seems to be a kind of inevitablility in the removal of meaning from the impulse to formalize and the expansion of meaning into the arena where some agency has to traverse the formalized object or text to make sense of it.
In Levi-Straussian terms, once the (Levi-Straussian) perception or myth of the propagation of the signifier (I'm going on my memory of Levi-Strauss's intro to Mauss' Essay on the Gift) becomes imaginable -- that is once we have the technology to imagine/ or visualize or even catalog the explosion of signifiers (from the dawn of language to the present photogenic moment), the idea of the "formal" is never the same. The purely formal is always haunted by a possibility of being read or traversed or transcribed or recorded in some way that restructures it...or in Lacanian terms...always subject to being recataloged into the immense cornucopia of the imaginary desire of the Other. And the sign of that is always something not-quite formalizable: the voice or the gaze.
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