Download or read book American Sublime written by Andrew Wilton and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published to accompany a major transatlantic exhibition, a tribute to U.S. landscape painting features more than one hundred works by the Hudson River School artists, complemented by three gatefolds, artist biographies, and essays on American landscape painting in the context of international traditions and national identity. (Fine Arts)

Download or read book American Technological Sublime written by David E. Nye and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.

Download or read book American Sublime written by Rob Wilson and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes "dominion everywhere." Wilson sets the stage for his "genealogy" with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets. He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others). Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power. Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into "the sublime" as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history. Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.

Download or read book American Sublime written by Elizabeth Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2005-10 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fourth collection of poems by the author recalls over a century of African American traditions, knitting together a blend of history, biography, personal experience, pop culture, and dreamscape.

Download or read book The American Sublime written by Mary Arensberg and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American poetics has been radicalized in recent years by revisionist theories which replay and ground poets against their Romantic precursors. Beginning with the sublime politics of Emerson and ending with women poets who renounce the authority of gender, The American Sublime represents the various modes of recent critical thinking. This collection of essays takes up the mapping of the American sublime begun by Harold Bloo. Prefaced by an introduction that traces the sublime from its origins in Longinus through Kant, Freud and Bloom, the essays focus on central American poetic scenes. These include the transparency of Emerson's vision of the sublime, Whitman's passage to India, Dickinson's corridors of the soul, and Stevens' contemplation of death in the auroras.

Download or read book Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime written by Robert Zaller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-25 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

Download or read book The Daemon Knows written by Harold Bloom and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWS Hailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now he turns at long last to his beloved writers of our national literature in an expansive and mesmerizing book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom’s most masterly book yet. Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers’ works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon”—the spark of genius or Orphic muse—in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors. As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon. Praise for The Daemon Knows “Enrapturing . . . radiant . . . intoxicating . . . Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “The capstone to a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching . . . The primary strength of The Daemon Knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. . . . Bloom’s books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground.”—The Washington Post “Audacious . . . The Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work.”—The Huffington Post “The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.”—John Ashbery “Mesmerizing.”—New York Journal of Books “Bloom is a formidable critic, an extravagant intellect.”—Chicago Tribune “As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom’s any more.”—The Guardian (U.K.)

Download or read book The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism written by Christophe Den Tandt and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.

Download or read book Postmodern Sublime written by Joseph Tabbi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.

Download or read book The Sublime written by Timothy M. Costelloe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.

Download or read book Niagara Falls written by Elizabeth R. McKinsey and published by Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth McKinsey has chronicled and examined the changing image of Niagara Falls between the seventeenth and twentieth century.

Download or read book Nature and Culture American Landscape and Painting 1825 1875 With a New Preface written by Barbara Novak Altschul Professor of Art History Barnard College and Columbia University (Emerita) and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-01-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. "An impressive achievement." --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review "An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole." --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine

Download or read book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy written by Emily Brady and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

Download or read book Destructive Sublime written by Tanine Allison and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-25 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American popular imagination has long portrayed World War II as the “good war,” fought by the “greatest generation” for the sake of freedom and democracy. Yet, combat films and other war media complicate this conventional view by indulging in explosive displays of spectacular violence. Combat sequences, Tanine Allison argues, construct a counter-narrative of World War II by reminding viewers of the war’s harsh brutality. Destructive Sublime traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre by looking back at it through the lens of contemporary video games like Call of Duty. Allison locates some of video games’ glorification of violence, disruptive audiovisual style, and bodily sensation in even the most canonical and seemingly conservative films of the genre. In a series of case studies spanning more than seventy years—from wartime documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro to fictional reenactments like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan to combat video games like Medal of Honor—this book reveals how the genre’s aesthetic forms reflect (and influence) how American culture conceives of war, nation, and representation itself.

Download or read book The Patagonian Sublime written by Marcos Mendoza and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine generated contents note: Contents List of Acronyms List of Spanish Terms List of Images Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Part One: The Sphere of Tourism Consumption 1 Alpine-Style Mountaineering: Resolve and Death in the Andes 2 Adventure Trekking: Pursuing the Alpine Sublime Part Two: The Sphere of Service Production 3 Comerciante Entrepreneurship: Investment Hazard and Ethical Laboring 4 Golondrina Laboring: Informality and Play Part Three: The Sphere of the Conservation State 5 Community-Based Conservation: Land Managers and State-Civil Society Collaborations 6 Conservation Policing: Education and Environmental Impacts Part Four: The Politics of the Green Economy 7 Defending Popular Sustainability in la Comuna 8 Kirchnerismo and the Politics of the Green Economy Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

Download or read book The Trivial Sublime written by Linda Munk and published by Springer. This book was released on 1993-01-21 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The National Security Sublime written by Matthew Potolsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.