Sublime Objects: An Apple, An Earthquake, the Given World

Room: Languages & Literature, 1st Floor

This talk alights on vital places in the history of the philosophy of the sublime: in ancient Greece and Rome with fragments of Sappho, in eighteenth-century Europe with the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and its intellectual aftershocks, and in the contemporary moment, where the idea of sublimity fractures and proliferates into theories of traumatic experience, overwhelm, and the unrepresentable. Can anything be salvaged from this ambivalent concept or from our unfinished desire for it? What is the object--the end--of the sublime?

Rebecca Ariel Porte is a member of the Core Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is at work on a philosophy of paradise, Arcadia, and the Golden Age called On Earthly Delights and a book of essays about poems, Impossible to Take Alive. The latter is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.