Sublime

This article deals with the philosophical idea of worldmaking pursued through techné, meaning the fusion of the technical means of artistic creation, theorizing, and analysis, but specifically occurring in a feedback loop involving introspection and computation (cybernetic phenomenology). The discussion ranges over a wide variety of topics, including (1) the history of music theory from Ancient Greece to the present (including a rebuttal to Daniel Chua’s (2001) account of music history); (2) emergent properties in music arising from self-organization (explored through the Ancient Chinese abstract strategy board game go); (3) the ontology of musical qualities (properties) and categories (including their relation to visual, tactile, and olfactory qualities and categories). 
Various repertoires, artists, and philosophies are referenced. The essay analyzes aspects of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, Carter’s String Quartet No. 5, and Lachenmann’s Kinderspiel.  Connections to the author’s own previous analytical and theoretical work are also discussed in relation to his interactive algorithmic audio-visual works (such as Fluxations and FluxNOISations). The techné of these is discussed in terms of logistics as well as aesthetic influences, including Wagner, Liszt, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Crawford, Babbitt, Carter, Xenakis, Parker, Reich, Ligeti, Truax, Oliveros, Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Pollock, Hofmann, Rothko, Louis, Frankenthaler, Moholy-Nagy, Newman, Richter, and Brakhage.  The essay touches on philosophical ideas of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, Harman, and Bogost, and more fully engages the philosophies of Nelson Goodman and Hannah Arendt in connection with artistic creation as relating to the theorizing and analysis of artistic works.     

Contact the author at jmailman@alumni.uchicago.edu
Download the article through JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.54.1.0005
or http://tinyurl.com/zdvkllr

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

The essay argues that the sublime, and especially the postmodern sublime, is an intricate and unresolved concept, and that it is not often coherent or necessary to import it into discourse on contemporary art.

This was also published as “Gegen das Erhabene," in Das Erhabene in Wissenschaft und Kunst: Über Vernunft und Einbildungskraft, edited by Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (Berlin: Surhkamp: 2010): 97–113.

Since "Iconoclash" (see the review above), iconoclasm and related terms have been taken as fundamental, general categories for the interpretation of pictures. This essay is part of a project to historicize that interest, which I think goes to a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century assumption about what pictures are.

[Revised March 2013]

By becoming aware of awareness we can experience the innermost sense or the felt sense of spaciousness and self-illumination. Within this state of open awareness, the openness of spacious luminous awareness, we can enter the experience of the radiance of light as energy through the sublime, luminous vibrations. The experience of the unfolding of sublime awareness and the corresponding energetic manifestation of the self-arising of primordial awareness is self-liberation. These experiences of the sublime manifestation of luminous energy was described by the 14 th century Dzogchen master Longchenpa in his text Precious Treasury of The Genuine Meaning. This meditative experience often arises spontaneously in Dzogchen meditation practice. This experience of translucent energetic manifestation is also described in Chan Buddhism, Hindu Kashmir Shavism, and Yan Xin Qi Gong. This experience of energetic manifestation can be experienced within subtle forms of respiration. Sometimes the ongoing sense of subtle luminous respiration can be experienced even as there is a profound sense of breathlessness. Breathlessness used here means no breath or minimal breath. This experience of the ongoing sense of respiration without breath is very powerful and empowering. In this experience of vast stillness there is no breath and yet there arises from deep within, a most subtle respiration within the breathlessness. During this respiration of stillness, the body seems to breathe and be breathed by most subtle inner wind. The inner sense of stillness expands and extends throughout the entire body and beyond the body's boundaries. This stillness opens us into the dimension of potential space, the dharmakaya and pure awareness.

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's 'aesthetics' from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's 'modernism', and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices.

La “crisis del arte como ‘ciencia europea’” fue también la crisis de la legitimidad inmanente y transcendente de los referenciales objetivo y subjetivo del fenómeno artístico. La fragmentación de la realidad y la desactualización de la metafísica significaron la falencia de toda metanarrativa basada en las ideas generales de la Naturaleza y de lo Absoluto. Las fuerzas productivas del arte ya no tuvieron cómo moderarse a través de la referencia a una facultad superior. Sin embargo, ha supervivido en el arte contemporáneo el enfrentamiento humano a lo que es enormemente más grande y/o poderoso que nuestra capacidad de comprensión y narración, sin la exigencia de una sintagmática representativa de ese acontecimiento, típica del Romanticismo y del arte moderno. La supervivencia del sentimiento de lo sublime en la sensibilidad posmoderna surge, por tanto, en la parte significativa de la producción artística contemporánea cuya manifestación ya no depende de una representación de su objeto o causa. A partir del análisis de una instalación de Richard Long y una performance del colectivo The Other, y con base en la analítica de lo sublime de Kant reconsiderada por Lyotard, esta investigación consiste en una experimentación teórica sobre las posibilidades de interpretación, crítica y análisis de estas obras del arte contemporáneo, en tanto que posibilidad juzgadora de producirse sentido, cuya afección puede evocarnos, de modo elevado, los sentimientos estéticos de placer y displacer generados en el esfuerzo racional frente a lo indeterminado y lo impresentable.

"The “crisis of art as ‘european science’” was also the crisis of the immanent and transcendent legitimacy of the objective and subjective referential of the artistic phenomenon. The Fragmentation of reality and the obsolescence of metaphysics meant the failure of any metanarrative based on the general ideas of Nature and the Absolute. The art productive forces did not have how to moderate through the reference to a higher faculty. However, has survived in the contemporary art the human confrontation with what is extremely large and/or powerful than our capacity for understanding and narration, without the requirement of a syntagmatic representative of that event, typical of romanticism and the modern art. The survival of the feeling of the sublime in post-modern sensibility emerges, therefore, in the significant part of contemporary artistic production which no longer depends on a representation of its object or cause. From the analysis of a Richard Long’s installation and a performance of the collective The Other, and based on the analytic of Kantian sublime reconsidered by Lyotard, this research consists in a theoretical experimentation on the possibilities of interpretation, criticism and analysis of these works of contemporary art, as judging possibility of producing meaning, whose condition can evoke us, high way, aesthetic feelings of pleasure and displeasure generated in rational effort opposite to the indeterminate and the unpresentable."

Este artigo pretende demonstrar (i) a influência exercida pela obra A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, de Edmund Burke, sobre o ensaio de H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural horror in literature e, conseqüentemente, (ii) a importância da teoria burkeana do sublime como fundamento da reflexão crítica contemporânea sobre a narrativa ficcional de horror.

Dark tourism is the act of travel to tourist sites associated with death, suffering
or the seemingly macabre (Stone 2006, 146). This phenomenon is object of
increasing attention from the scientific community, which has mainly focused
on two interpretive keys. Indeed, there is 1) a more established literature that
considers the dark tourism as a form of «collective effervescence», to approach
the sacred and sublime dimension of death, 2) a set of contributions that
have dealt with the process of commodification involving some experiences
and destinations of dark tourism. It is assumed that the condition of both
can be identified in the conception of dark tourism as a carnival experience
of liminality and some possible research developments are proposed.

Le sublime ne s’établissant jamais comme la dénomination d’un courant architectural ou stylistique propre, la recherche du terme ou de l’emploi de ses effets ou caractéristiques dans l’architecture se fait dans un contexte historique en constante évolution.
Ces recherches se sont construites autour des occurrences dans le discours de Philip Johnson de la notion de sublime. C’est à travers l’étude des différents écrits et entretiens réalisés par l’architecte que ce travail de recherche s’est organisé.

Philosophy as a method tries to identify – through logical analysis and phenomenological description – the conceptual basis of different modes of knowing and valuing. It is orientated towards constants in human experience, those features that enable the very possibility of knowing and valuing. However, whilst there are constants in experience, these are often realized differently, under different historical and cultural conditions. The realm of aesthetics is rich in such examples.  In the present Chapter , it will be explored in relation to the sublime and pictorial art (with a few references to other media).
                  I start from a radical adaptation and revision of theories set forth by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is then explained in detail why – despite its grounding in experiential constants - the sublime only emerges as an overt and sustained feature of aesthetic sensibility from the late eighteenth-century onwards. I then go on to consider why the sublime seems to disappear from European sensibility, only to re-emerge with great force in the postmodern era.

The paper analyzes the imagery of the Gigantomachy in Manilius' Astronomica, in two different functions: the first metaliterary and metascientific, the second in the form of mythical narration, identifying the intertextual relations with the Greek-Latin mythological subject and, inter alia, with the Augustan poetry and the Sublime poetic.

C’est grâce à une Décade de Pontigny, que Curtius, en 1922, a pu faire la connaissance de l’écrivain français Charles Du Bos. Les deux écrivains vont alors entamer une correspondance appelée à  durer jusqu’en 1935. Pourquoi Curtius sympathise-t-il avec Du Bos? Sans doute parce que Curtius et Du Bos partageaient la même vision mystique de Proust, de Hugo von Hofmannsthal et du mystique russe Viatcheslav Ivanov.

L’articolo affronta il tema della fascinazione indotta dal crimine da un punto di vista culturale ponendo l’attenzione su due aspetti: la dimensione emotiva che la caratterizza e il ruolo che essa assume nella società contemporanea. Dal punto di vista delle emozioni, si ipotizza che il “sublime” costituisca l’esperienza emotiva da porre al centro del processo di fascinazione e si propone un’analisi che traccia un parallelismo tra i concetti di “sublime” (Burke), “awe” (Haidt & Keltner) e “perturbante” (Freud). Per quanto riguarda il ruolo assunto dalla fascinazione indotta dal crimine e dal sublime nella società contemporanea, si propone una riflessione intorno ai concetti di godimento, mercificazione e di effervescenza collettiva, ispirata al pensiero di Lacan e di Maffesoli.

RESUMEN: El objetivo del presente trabajo es mostrar que en la modernidad existió un período, comprendido entre el último cuarto del siglo XVII y la década final del XVIII, en el cual se discutió intensamente la cuestión de lo sublime. Asimismo, intentaré dar cuenta de las razones por las que considero que la cuestión de lo sublime se volvió central en este período, y la manera en que un grupo de autores menos reconocidos influyó en el pensamiento de Burke, Kant y Schiller. Por último, sostendré que hacia el final del período las discusiones más sustanciales sobre lo sublime giraron en torno al intento de salvar la brecha entre la dimensión física y la dimensión moral del sujeto.

Desde a transição para o século XXI, o pensamento de Jacques Rancière tem-se destacado como um dos que mais insistentemente tem interrogado o devir contemporâneo da arte no seio – e em confronto – com o nosso tempo. Neste artigo, procuraremos lançar luz sobre alguns dos principais momentos do seu pensamento estético: desde o nexo entre estética e política em relação com o conceito de “partilha do sensível” à crítica da “viragem ética”. Este itinerário implicará esclarecer em que medida só no quadro de um “regime estético da arte” (cujo sentido importará também explicitar) se torna possível pensar uma “política da arte” e questionar criticamente a valorização do conceito de sublime contra o pano de fundo de uma suposta ruptura pós-moderna.

Since the threshold of the 21th century Rancière’s thought has emerged as one of the most significant attempts to reappraise the fate of art amidst – and against – the present times. In this article, my aim is to shed light on some of the main moments of his aesthetic thinking, ranging from the link between aesthetics and politics in relation to the concept of “distribution of the sensible” to the criticism raised against the “ethical turn”. Such an itinerary entails clarifying the extent to which only in the context of the “aesthetic regime of the art” (whose sense should be spelled out as well) a “politics of the art” becomes thinkable, and calling into question the praise of the concept of sublime against the background of an alleged post-modern break.

Il presente saggio intende ricostruire il nesso che unisce il percorso teologico e quello musicale/musicologico di Pierangelo Sequeri, esplicitandone anche le implicazioni pedagogiche nei termini musicoterapeutici elaborati da e in tali percorsi. Il nesso in oggetto è qui determinato, tramite l’analisi storico-teoretica – condotta da Sequeri, e in questa sede su Sequeri – dell’itinerario musicale dell’Occidente, come e con l’anagogia, in quanto struttura teoretica che consente di fruire dell’idea spirituale della musica come espressione dell’assoluto affettivo, afferrabile a partire dalla percezione del sensibile e ultimamente inafferrabile proprio in quanto sublime, inteso come inseità redentiva della creazione, emblematicamente espressa nella persuasiva e pervasiva illustrazione dell’eccezionalità di Mozart.

Mémoire de Master 1 d'Etudes Cinématographiques, sous la direction de Pierre Berthomieu, Université Paris 7, 2008.
Ce mémoire retrace les liens entre le genre du 'cinéma catastrophe', souvent décrié par la critique, et ses influences picturales (des premières représentations du Déluge à la peinture romantique allemande), philosophiques (l'esthétique du sublime de Burke), et théologiques (des références bibliques aux influences païennes), témoignant ainsi de l'inscription des films dans une culture partagée sur laquelle ils peuvent se faire loquaces. Aussi, les analyses de films s'attachent-elles à relever leurs filiations spirituelles (chrétiennes, païennes, ou vitalistes), mais également à révéler leurs fréquentes difficultés à mettre en place des univers fictionnels uniformes et cohérents, leurs tentatives pour justifier l'évènement catastrophiste ne pouvant aboutir qu'au syncrétisme religieux. La thématique de la catastrophe dans le cinéma force ainsi, en retour, à poser un regard circonspect sur les 'fictions' que nous apposons au monde réel dans les efforts décousus entrepris par notre culture pour le comprendre sous le régime du sens.

Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides or Fingal’s Cave is regularly considered the musical landscape (or seascape) painting par excellence. Scarcely another work has such an unerring capacity to suggest the wide horizons, delicate nuances of changing color and light, the ceaseless rolling of the ocean breakers and freedom of the sea. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of this idea of musical landscape since
the early nineteenth century, it is far from clear analytically or phenomenologically how the predominantly aural and temporal experience of music might convey a sense of visual space that would appear central to the perception of landscape. This article explores Mendelssohn’s archetypal example of the musical seascape in order to unravel these concerns. After briefly charting the philosophical reefs that
encircle this issue, I examine how the aural may nevertheless translate to the visual, and thus how music might create its own, virtual landscape. Traveling beyond this, however, we reach the limits of mimesis and the visual for explaining Mendelssohn’s overture, uncovering his music’s implications for mythic-historical and personal memory, synaesthesia, and the embodied subject. Ultimately I argue for a more ecomusicological understanding of Mendelssohn’s work as embodying a critical reading of a fragile human subjectivity within nature, an immersive projection of the wild, northern sublime.

Keywords: Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture, musical landscape, embodied subject, musical ecology,

Con el título de «Observaciones sobre el sentimiento de lo bello y lo sublime» publicó Kant en Komgsbey (1764) este ensayo de vario y atrayente contenido. Numerosas ediciones sueltas se han hecho de este encantador tratadito, sin contar las varias ediciones de las obras completas del autor.

Tourism has been theorized in a new ethnography of modernity, stressing the
museumization of the premodern and its production as spectacle. In this article,
I explore the voice and perspective of the “tribal culture” recently exposed
to a new type of gaze. Tourists are perceived as predatory voyeurs on
Sumba, a once remote area now receiving increasing numbers of foreign visitors.
An idiom of visual consumption encodes a critical awareness of global
inequities in access to and use of technology, and a history of changing selfperceptions.
The cameras that every tourist brings to capture images of headhunters
and primitive violence become the very emblems of the exotic violence
that they are designed to capture. [tourism, photography, cultural
identity, Eastern Indonesia, violence, headhunting.

During the early 19th century, the demand for tourism grew enormously in Europe. The city of Naples, already a favored destination for the travels of 18th century intellectuals, artists and aristocrats, prepared to meet the expectations of a new audience, inaugurating a new concept of travel: no longer as just an instrument for cultural education, but also as “leisure travel”. This paper analyzes these changes , observing the emblematic case of Vesuvius, one of the major attractors and symbolic elements of the traveler‟s journey in the Gulf of Naples.
At the end of the eighteenth century those who would ascend to the crater, whether on foot or by donkey, were mostly scholars, interested in the eruptive phenomena. In subsequent years, the “scientific” representations of Vesuvius were flanked by views for 'touristic'
purposes, replicating successful formulas that had been standardized around other sites, in an earlier stage. This modification of the purposes of the journey, its users, and the related representations, in an ever-increasing promotional trend, reached its peak with the
construction of the funicular between 1870 and 1880. The very broad resonance of this development makes it emblematic of the transition from 'journey' to 'tourism'.

This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography.

Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562

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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0

O presente livro debruça-se sobre o pensamento estético de Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) e procura esclarecer aquele que é porventura o seu desafio mais decisivo: a captação e a exploração críticas do «teor de verdade» de obras de arte. Que a verdade da arte, segundo Adorno – para quem esta questão se declina no singular, em torno de obras de arte concretas –, seja inseparável do seu potencial crítico, da sua negatividade, é insofismável. Contudo, este potencial – de que não seria possível dar conta abstraindo da imanência dos processos artísticos – revela-se irredutível aos ditames de uma arte explicitamente política.

Na esteira da insistência de Adorno na tese de que o potencial crítico e a autonomia da arte não se contradizem, a dialéctica entre verdade e aparência ocupou um lugar central na recepção da estética adorniana. Nos termos dessa dialéctica, a arte seria crítica não só na medida em que certas obras de arte exibem a negatividade do real, mas também por nelas despontar o que no meio da aparência artística escapa a essa mesma negatividade. O «teor de verdade» seria então a «aparência do não-aparente», que mais não seria do que a aparência da reconciliação de contradições históricas e sociais que atravessam tanto o plano do real quanto a esfera das artes. Ora, é para desequilibrar esta dialéctica entre verdade e aparência – e, por conseguinte, para impedir que a pesquisa de Adorno seja confundida com uma estética utópica enquadrada por uma filosofia da reconciliação – que se deslocará a atenção para o conceito de enigma.

Segundo a hipótese que norteia este ensaio, o «teor de verdade» de obras de arte jogar-se-ia no facto de estas resistirem à interpretação em virtude do seu «carácter enigmático». Em vários casos – nomeadamente nos estudos dedicados a Beethoven, Kafka, Hölderlin, Beckett e Mahler – o âmago da estética adorniana residiria no desdobramento dos efeitos críticos de um tal confronto com o «enigmático». Seguindo por vias menos trilhadas na estética de Adorno, dir-se-á que a arte não se limita a denunciar o real – sob a figura do «protesto» – ou a antecipar um outro real por vir – sob a figura da «utopia» – mas, enquanto «enigma», lança a razão numa crise de compreensão que perturba a inteligibilidade do real e, consequentemente, desloca as condições da sua possível transformação. Chega-se assim à hipótese, na qual se joga quer a singularidade quer a actualidade da proposta de Adorno, segundo a qual o seu pensamento estético constitui, a despeito da sua suposta ancoragem nas heranças filosóficas associadas aos conceitos de belo e de sublime, uma «estética do enigmático».

The “relation between art and knowledge” in Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s notion of art, which is the main subject in this study includes scrutinizing of opinion that genuine works of art can provide “a kind of” knowledge and distinguishing this kind of knowledge from other kinds of knowledge. The kind of knowledge attained from works of art that Kant and Schopenhauer define is the knowledge of the “Ideas”. The knowledge of the Ideas, unlike the conceptual knowledge, is the knowledge of the essence of things, of intuitions that certain concepts are incapacity to explain them. Ideas are similar to concepts as that both are related to universality. However there is a crucial distinction: ideas are intuitive, whereas concepts are abstract. The works of art created by genius artists as distinct from explaining the facts or things with concepts as in sciences, but can transmit of ideas by setting forth the intuitional expression of objects or facts of their subject matter. Emphasizing the knowledge attained through works of art, which is the knowledge of ideas, is crucial for demonstrating that art can acquire knowledge by conducing to revive in human mind the ideas which is intiutional, not by giving abstract or “ready – at – hand” knowledges via transmission the concepts.

Considering art as a way of attaining the knowledge of ideas as can be helpful in solution for discussions of art about what of art and evaluation of works of art, can provide the potentiality of altering even points of view to the world syn enhance people’s “cultures” by demonstrating ideas. In this study, an answer is sought to the question of how this potentiality can be realized.

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar en qué sentido la cuestión de lo sublime es central en la refundición de la fenomenología propuesta por Marc Richir. En un primer momento, partiremos del análisis kantiano de lo sublime, cuyo papel arquitectónico trataremos de situar con precisión en el conjunto de la crítica. Más adelante, examinaremos el análisis fenomenológico, propuesto por Richir, del movimiento de la imaginación en juego en la experiencia de lo sublime. Intentaremos asimismo mostrar cómo, en sus trabajos más recientes, interpreta Richir con mayor precisión este movimiento como propio de la afectividad. Por último, para concluir, trataremos de poner de manifiesto cómo la arquitectónica richiriana se articula en torno a las tres Ideas reguladoras kantianas (el sí-mismo, «Dios» y el mundo), pero tal y como se desprenden, fenomenológicamente reducidas, de la experiencia de lo sublime.

We provide a review of the literature concerning aesthetic engagement (especially with literature and film) during times of distress. The objective is to offer a conceptual framework for this fledging research area and to provide a context for several manuscripts on this topic included in a Special Issue of Scientific Study of Literature (Volume 3, Issue 2). Particular attention is given to processes that arguably are distinctively aesthetic, including (1) the role of prosodic/semantic structures in the generation of local aesthetic objects within a longer narrative; (2) the identification of an affective theme through reflective consideration of a series of separate—but resonant—local aesthetic objects; and (3) the consequent emergence of poignantly bivalent feelings tinged with loss. This framework invites reconsideration of the Aristotelian conception of catharsis (understood as clarification rather than purgation), as well as examination of how poignant aesthetic engagement invites revaluation of personal priorities during moments of vulnerability.

Some part of me wishes I was profoundly moved by Richard Mosse’s video installation, Incoming (2014–17), at the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2017 Triennale. Although most viewers were captivated by it, I felt uncomfortably  cynical, not indifferent to the suffering it purported to show but to its overt use of theatrics. While I can appreciate Mosse’s ghost‑like imagery of refugees who appear at once distant and intimate, I think the emotional core of the work owes more to collaborator Ben Frost’s lively electronic soundtrack, which is ultimately manipulative in its effect. This is the dilemma of politically‑motivated, pathos‑laden work: how do we negatively judge something that has such a good heart? Confronted with Mosse’s images of a child’s autopsy whose body has decomposed, it is hard not to feel callous when judging such things based on formal superficialities.

Landscape description is one of the prominent features in this novel. By these descriptions, Washington Irving created a mysterious, legendary circumstance. These landscape descriptions are more than picturesque landscape, but sublime landscape.

Burke is an important exception to Nietzsche's claim that philosophical aesthetics ignores physiology and the role of practical interest. Burke's theory of the sublime offers a physiological explanation of our feelings of sublimity that explicitly defines certain conditions of our nerves as the 'efficient cause' of such feelings. In examining Burke's views in relation to contemporary somaesthetics, cognitive psychology, and physiology, this paper shows that though Burke's somatic arguments can be criticized as overly simplistic and mechanistic, his recognition of the crucial bodily dimensions of aesthetic experience should be taken more seriously. (edited)