Category: Assignment One research

When deciding on a direction for assignment one, I chose firstly a location, the seaside. I wanted to convey something about the time of year, that is Christmas and New Year or Winter Solstice if you like which took me to the idea of beginnings and endings. I had the sense that the Sublime had …

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Monet, Belle-elle, Rain effect. (Commons.wikimedia.org, 2019) This is a review of a journal article in 'New Literary History' written by Stephen Levine in 1985. Based on the accounts of various artists who travelled to see the sights of 'Belle-ile-en-mer, a small island off the coast of Brittany, the overall language of the piece evokes the …

Continue reading "Seascapes of the sublime: Vernet, Monet, and that Oceanic Feeling"

Andreas Gursky Andreas Gursky seeks to find the sublime within the complex dynamic of globalisation. The intricate layers of transaction that occur prior to our purchase of a cheap mobile phone for example. The images are not 'of nature' in the traditional Burkean sense but show an environment that we have created that has a …

Continue reading "Exploring work of photographers and artists dealing with the sublime"

Burke, pleasure, pain and self-preservation In 1757, Edmund Burke published his treatise on the aesthetics: "A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". It provided a systematic analysis of the qualities of the sublime providing a theoretical framework and a legitimacy to the Romantic movement. (Wordsworth Trust, 2020) Burke …

Continue reading "Burke, Kant and the spiritual sublime"