 Overview
Schedule
Assignments
Student Writing
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This course is concerned with aesthetics, and in particular the sublime, as it forms and reforms in British and Continental theory, literature, and criticism between 1650-1800. If the study of aesthetics generally concerns the epistemology of artworks – the accounting for that area of human activity we engage in when producing, evaluating, or encountering artworks – then the driving question of the discourse of the sublime is, what causes and sustains aesthetic pleasure, and in what does that pleasure consist? Furthermore, being as it is concerned with greatness, the sublime requires us to confront the realm of judgement. How do we judge the relative merits, powers, and effects of artworks? How do we know when we are exercising “good” or “fair” judgement? Following that, we then must ask, what are the politics of the sublime? Finally, what are its politico-cultural effects?
We shall explore the discourse of the sublime from the initial translation of Longinus’ Peri Hypsous (commonly translated as On the Sublime) into English in 1652 during the rise of English republicanism in treatises, prose essays, and poetry; through its manifestations in neo-classical and eighteenth-century prose and poetry, as well as English and Continental philosophy; and finally to early German and English Romanticism through the period around 1800. The course also studies ground-breaking twentieth-century scholarship on the sublime in order to grasp the ways in which literary criticism and theory have created, reinforced, or expanded traditional narratives about the sublime in English literary culture.
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Office & Office Hours
 Independence 175B
T 2:30-3:45pm and by appointment
Course Location & Time
Lippitt Hall 203
T/R 12:30-1:45 pm
Required Texts
Course Packet. Available at Rhode Island Book Store
Longinus, On the Sublime. 1 A.D. Trans. W. H. Fyfe; Rev. D. A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library, 1996.
ISBN: 0674995635
John Milton, Paradise Lost. 1674. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005.
ISBN: 0393924289
The Book of Job. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
ISBN: 0060969598
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Ed. James T. Boulton. Indiana: U of Notre Dame P, 1993.
ISBN: 0268000859
Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgement. 1790. Trans. James Creed Meredith. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. ISBN: 0198245890
Anne Radcliffe. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
ISBN: 0198245890
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Ed. Marilyn Gaull. New York: Longman, 2004.
ISBN: 0321202082
Suggested Texts
Michael Greer. What Every Student Should Know About Citing Sources with MLA Documentation. New York: Longman, 2006.
ISBN: 0321447379
Joseph Gibaldi. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th Rev. Edition. MLA P, 2003
ISBN: 0873529863
Diana Hacker. A Writer’s Reference. 5th Sprl edition. Bedford/St. Martin's P, 2003.
ISBN: 0312412622
Course Requirements
Participation (15%)
4 Short Essays (40%)
Seminar Paper (45%)
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