The Sublime

We began the lesson by looking at an image of the sublime in an artistic form followed by Sir making some horrible joke involves a lime and what not.

The Sublime:
That which comes into your mind, under the threshold. Something that seeps in.

We found out that in the 18th century, the general idea was that the sublime is the feeling of being reduced to something truly insignificant in the face of the might of God or nature - particularly nature in the Gothic.

The class were then asked to list some examples of the 'awe-inspiring' feeling denoted by the sublime.
We came up with:
- Massive mountains, time square and massive woods.
- Astronomical scale (How massive the universe is compared to us)

- The vastness of the sea.

We looked at the critic Edmund Burke's view on the sublime in his work 'Sublime and Beautiful':

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger . . . Or is conversant about the terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a sources of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

We can see that Burke separates the sublime and beauty in two separate spheres. The sublime consisting of obscurity, power, darkness, solitude and vastness while beauty revolves around the ideas of smoothness, delicacy, smallness and light.

Sir told us that a good Burkean example of the sublime (somewhat subdued) occurs when Radcliffe's Emily from The Mysteries of Udolpho first sees the the Campagna of Italy:

"As the travellers still ascended among the pine-forests, steep rose over steep, the mountains seemed to multiply as they went, and what was the summit of one eminence proved to be the only base of another. At length they reached a little plan where the drivers stopped to rest the mules, whence a scene of such extent and magnificence opened below, as drew even from Madame Montoni a note of admiration. Emily lost, for a moment, her sorrows in the immensity of nature."

We see that the references to mountains that "multiply" and the "immensity of nature" are two of several references to the sublime in the extract above.

After taking down these notes, the class was split into pairs and each give an extract describing the sublime in some way; they had to read the extract and tell the class what each writer said about the sublime. The extracts can be found on the powerpoint for the lesson which you can find in: Learning Resources, English, Chatterley.

Next, we looked at the ways in which landscapes in our three texts serve to give rise to the feeling of the sublime.
Some examples of these landscapes being:

- The Yorkshire Moors - Wuthering Heights
- Desolate Place/ Heath - Macbeth
- Town - The Lady of the House of Love
- Castle - The Bloody Chamber

The class went further and actually said that the sublime is more than just a landscape.

We see in 'The Prelude' by Wordsworth the character simmers in the face of the mountains as it reminds him of his limitations.

When the class related this to the Gothic, we were told that this feeling is developed to assign a place for humans in the world but at the same time hint that transgression of that 'place in the world' is still possible.

Homework:
"The concept of the sublime helps to define the gothic genre. Discuss in relation to Macbeth and two other texts."

Sir wants us to plan an intro and three 'Chunkles' about what we are going to write for each text.
For example:
Intro - The sublime is a key tennant in Macbeth...
Chunkle One - Sublime in Macbeth
Chunkle Two - Sublime in The Bloody Chamber

Chunkle Three - Subline in Wuthering Heights

Roman A.

P.S. Blog looks a little weird...I don't care.