The Terror of Possibility: a Re-Evaluation and Reconception Of

University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2013 The eT rror of Possibility: A Re-evaluation and Reconception of the Sublime Aesthetic Kurt Fawver University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Esthetics Commons, and the Film and Media Studies Commons Scholar Commons Citation Fawver, Kurt, "The eT rror of Possibility: A Re-evaluation and Reconception of the Sublime Aesthetic" (2013). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4482 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Terror of Possibility: A Re-evaluation and Reconception of the Sublime Aesthetic by Kurt Fawver A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Amy Rust, Ph.D. Hunt Hawkins, Ph.D. Lawrence Broer, Ph.D. Date of Approval: April 26, 2013 Keywords: Sublimity, Art, Theory, 2001, Kubrick Copyright © 2013, Kurt Fawver TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures......................................................................................ii Abstract.............................................................................................iii Introduction: To Define the Indefinable....................................................1 Chapter One: An Incomplete History.......................................................9 Chapter Two: Ripples in the Lake..........................................................35 Chapter Three: Diving into the Lake......................................................49 Chapter Four: The Anxiety of Change in the Literary Arts.........................83 Chapter Five: Spectacles of Sublimity in Film........................................118 Conclusion: Possibility, Eternal and Ultimate.........................................155 Endnotes.........................................................................................158 Bibliography.....................................................................................164 i LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Barnett Newman's Jericho......................................................46 Figure 2: Earth's monolith..................................................................120 Figure 3: The moon monolith..............................................................123 Figure 4: Discovery One airlock...........................................................125 Figure 5: Bowman in HAL's processor core............................................126 Figure 6: Match cut from bone to nukes...............................................128 Figure 7: Bowman and the monolith....................................................133 Figure 8: Bowman as the Star-Child....................................................134 Figure 9: Zombie shoppers.................................................................137 Figure 10: Zombies in parking lot........................................................138 Figure 11: Zombie horde....................................................................139 Figure 12: The mist...........................................................................141 Figure 13: Mist poster........................................................................143 Figure 14: Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.........144 Figure 15: Docile, awe-inspiring monster..............................................145 Figure 16: London desert...................................................................147 Figure 17: Alone in London.................................................................148 Figure 18: Alien ship.........................................................................153 ii ABSTRACT While the sublime aesthetic has a long and complex critical history, it is nonetheless a schizophrenic concept. Indeed, in the over two thousand years since the sublime became a subject of learned inquiry, it has not been resolved into any one concrete idea, but has become, rather, an expansive tapestry of disparate if interconnected theoretical threads from which aestheticians may pick and choose to define what they mean by the term “sublime.” Kant postulates one sort of sublime, Burke another, and Lyotard, Zizek, and the Romantics still others. In this way, the contemporary sublime aesthetic is, in essence, an ever-extending discourse of recombinatory effort. The goal of this dissertation is to stitch together the competing conceptual threads that constitute the contemporary definition of the sublime aesthetic and to uncover the foundational core from which all those ideas spring. Through analysis and deconstruction of several major theories on the sublime as well as through critical evaluation of a host of literary and cinematic texts (for example Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Don Delillo's White Noise), this dissertation contends that the deepest substratum of the sublime aesthetic lies in dynamism and possibility. Indeed, both art objects and philosophical rationale show that the sublime aesthetic is, at iii base, the recognition of the entire sphere of the possible and its necessarily constitutive threatening dynamism in a physically or ideologically destructive object or act of vast size, power, or mystery. This dissertation argues that a theory of the sublime as possibility that entails uncontrollable dynamism helps to further clarify – if not fully explicate – the aesthetic and resolves the tension and incompatibility between preexisting ideas on the subject. Therefore, as a new theory of the sublime aesthetic, this dissertation is, at very least, a novel formulation of an ancient and undervalued concept in art and critical theory and, at best, a work that unearths the deepest, heretofore unrecognized, layers of an aesthetic experience central to human perception. iv INTRODUCTION: TO DEFINE THE INDEFINABLE What is the sublime aesthetic? An illusion constructed of grammar and verbiage. A mixed feeling of terror and awe. The imagination's inability to keep pace with rationality. The stretching of perception to its outermost limits. An irresolvable aporia at the very heart of the act of representation. All these explanations have, at one time or another, functioned as the sublime's axiomatic core. Indeed, for centuries, art and literary critics, philosophers, rhetoricians, and theologians have defined (and redefined) the aesthetic variously in an attempt to formulate a more exact and more descriptive conception of sublimity. As such, the aforementioned laundry list of suppositions is certainly not a comprehensive collection of the many foundations suggested for the sublime, but, rather, a mere perfunctory grouping of the most widely held and influential ideas on the subject. And yet, even this list, this superficial glance at some of the seminal thoughts on the aesthetic, reveals significant instability and disconnection within the discourse on the sublime. How, for instance, can the triumph of rationality – seemingly the antithesis of emotion – be compatible with feelings of terror and awe? Why does the inability to perceive necessarily denote a lack within representation's power rather than an incomprehensible plenitude? How do 1 simple vocabulary choices lead to cosmic feelings of wonder and dread? These are just a few of the questions that scholars have wrestled with and elaborated upon in the wake of a perpetually shifting core conception of the sublime, a core that, on perfunctory inspection, appears to have only the most tenuous tethering between its many forms. In the over two-thousand years since the sublime aesthetic became a subject of learned inquiry, it has not been resolved into any one concrete idea, but has, instead, been weaved into an expansive tapestry of theoretical notions from which aestheticians may pick and choose to define what they mean by the term “sublime.” In this way, the contemporary sublime aesthetic is, in essence, an ever-extending discourse of recombinatory effort. One scholar may utilize a blend of Kantian sublime (stressing rationality's supremacy) and Longinian sublime (exploring the power of rhetoric) to discuss the works of Virginia Woolf while another might slake off bits of the Burkean sublime (involving the feeling of terror and wonderment) and incorporate them into the Lyotardian sublime (which considers the sublime as an attempted representation of the unrepresentable) in order to more fully illuminate the psychological state one enters when viewing the art of, say, Jackson Pollock. The sheer fact that, in this superficial example, one must qualify what type of sublime aesthetic is being merged with another only further illuminates the conundrum – namely, that there is no one sublime aesthetic within contemporary (or even historic) parlance. While such variable usage is all good and well for practical matters of critical application or expansion into multidisciplinary fields (psychology, for 2 instance), it provides little answer the original question: what is the sublime aesthetic? Given the wealth of definitions concerning its fundamental nature, perhaps this is ultimately a loaded question. After

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