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.

Horror, Terror and some Supernatural V.2.0

This is the second blog I'm doing today seeing as my first, actual blog was deleted for some stupid reason.

Here we go.

Lesson started, talked about what is terror and what is horror.
Horror = Physical and external fear.
Terror = Psychological and internal fear.

After understanding this, we made a list of films we thought were terrifying e.g. Paranormal Activity and films that were horrifying e.g. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Following this we watched some trailers that displayed films from both these spheres.

Next, we read an article by Ann Radcliffe about the supernatural. You can find it here: http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/radcliffe_sup.pdf
If you were not here you need to read it and print it off for yourself.

We made notes on the separate pages of the article and discussed how Terror is shown to heighten and improve the sense while horror simply freezes and incapacitates them.

We discussed why Radcliffe writes her article as a commentary and came to the conclusion that it was so she could voice the concerns of the average Victorian when it comes to the supernatural and address their issues toward it.

Finally we talked about which aspect, terror or horror, was more obscure and which concept this relates to.
I, personally, thought that terror is far more obscure because it is much harder to create a sense of terror compared to the raw, brutal violence needed for horror.

Homework:

- Re-read article.

I know it's late; I tried to do it properly to make up for it but it got deleted and I am not happy at all.

Roman A.

embedding social, historical and literary contexts

We started off the lesson linking words with their meanings regarding the gothic, these consisted of: liminality, oppositions, transgression, byronic hero, uncanny, uncanny of the monumental, fragmented narrative, framing, pathetic fallacy, horror, terror, prolix, heterogenous, supernatural, ambiguous, lexical cluster, ambivalent and cultural parasite.

We then read an article named the homely gothic, it talked about how the gothic has been domesticated and how the victorian audience were more frightened of domestic issues, for instance Wuthering Heights.

Our homework was to answer these seven quesions
1. Why does the writer suggest ghosts are significant?
2. Why is victorian society lacking value, spirit, imagination etc.?
3. What does this have to do with the Lady of Shalott?
4. What is 'the privileged site of Victorian culture'?
5. Why is this significant in Wuthering Heights?
6. Why do you think this article is called 'homely gothic'?
7. Which elements could we see as being domesticated by Bronte?

Leigh

Cultural Parasite

The title of the lesson was Cultural Parasite. (obviously).

We were then asked what we wanted to learn today as our 'starter;. There were many options but I chose 'I want to know about parasites and hwo they relate to Heathcliff'. After that we looked at a painting that we had "seen loads of times before" (we'd never seen it before). It was called The Sleep of Reason Berings Forth Monsters by someone called Goya.

After that we moved on to our 'main course'. The question I picked for this was 'has any of this lesson been about you'. The answer was no. Then we read 'Victorian Gothic' by Julian Wolfreys and analysed it. We then split up in to small groups, with each one of the 3 groups being given one of Macbeth, Bloody Chamber or Wuthering Heights. My group was assigned the Bloody Chamber and we had to make a table showing the book's "relevant societal fears or 'deeper wounds'" and then display "how these fears are shown in the text". After gathering this information we swapped one person in our group who then went off to another group and shared the knowledge.

Finally, the dessert was served and the question on the menu I chose was "what has this lesson reminded you of?". My answer was 'parasites'.

Homework: Re-read the article we read (Victorian Gothic by Julian Wolfreys) and make notes.

Before any moans, I realise I wrote this late, but of couse thats no excuse for not doing your homework. And we have english after school, too (cant wait!!!!!!!!!!)

Daniel.