Hi Class,

**I’ve only received 7 Final Drafts of the Midterm Essay. If you have not already done so, please post your final draft today!

For Wednesday:

1–Read “The Iron Tonic” graphic story and answer these two questions: What examples of the sublime are noticeable in this story? Second, how many gothic elements (there are 4) can you find in this story?

2–Review ideas for The Sublime:

The Sublime:

The sublime is the feeling that arises from something awe-inspiring, breath-taking, unique, incomparable, beyond words. The sublime can also be the object, concept, quality, or experience that launches such feelings. As several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travelers noted, the Alps are sublime in this sense because nothing at ground level prepares one for the view from their austere peaks, where earth and sky seem to meet (e.g., Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog—SEE BELOW (1817). Western aesthetics has been interested in the concept of the sublime since at least the first century, when the Greek scholar Longinus wrote his treatise On the Sublime. But it was not until the publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) that it became a topic of philosophical interest. Burke’s opposition between beauty as that which is well-formed and pleasing and sublime as that which is ugly, fearful and desirable all at once continues to inform thinking on this subject still. A particularly useful quote from Burke is: Sublimity may evoke horror, but knowledge that the perception is a fiction is pleasureful.” In effect, Burke’s distinction is between that which we perceive with simple pleasure (the beautiful) and that which truly moves us (sublime). German philosopher, Immanuel Kant adopts Burke’s opposition and uses it to discuss the limits of the imagination and the senses in contrast to the power of reason—for him, sublime is exalted and great.

Below: The Hahnen is a mountain of the Urner Alps, overlooking Engelberg in the Swiss canton of Obwalden. It has an elevation of 2,606 metres above sea level. (from Wikipedia article on The Sublime)