Sublime Historical Experience PDF Download

Author: F. R. Ankersmit
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804749367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? This book investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge.

Author: Amy J. Elias
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801867339
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.

Author: David E. Nye
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262640343
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing, Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history - that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge from new social and technological conditions, and that each new configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the fantasy world of Las Vegas.

Author: Peter P. Icke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415808030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The contemporary Dutch historical theorist and philosopher Frank Ankersmit, an erstwhile advocate and promulgator of what has become known as 'the linguistic turn' in historical theory, is very well known within the discipline. His early position with regard to the historical text is frequently discussed and evaluated today, and his writings on the subject are often cited. However, this former narrativist position, so robustly defended by Ankersmit in the past, has been progressively marginalized by Ankersmit himself as his current and radically different theoretical position, most fully expressed in his recent publication Sublime Historical Experience, now takes precedence. Frank Ankersmit's Lost Historical Cause is a polemical account of, and a suggested explanation for, this Ankersmitean 'trajectory' of thought which transported Ankersmit from the sustainable logic of his early work on the narrative form to the arguably unsustainable concept of sublime historical experience.

Author: Frank R. Ankersmit
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464323
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In this book, the noted intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit provides a systematic account of the problems of reference, truth, and meaning in historical writing. He works from the conviction that the historicist account of historical writing, associated primarily with Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm von Humboldt, is essentially correct but that its original idealist and romanticist idiom needs to be translated into more modern terms. Rehabilitating historicism for the contemporary philosophy of history, he argues, "reveals the basic truths about the nature of the past itself, how we relate to it, and how we make sense of the past in historical writing." At the heart of Ankersmit's project is a sharp distinction between interpretation and representation. The historical text, he holds, is first and foremost a representation of some part of the past, not an interpretation. The book's central chapters address the concept of historical representation from the perspectives of reference, truth, and meaning. Ankersmit then goes on to discuss the possible role of experience in the history writing, which leads directly to a consideration of subjectivity and ethics in the historian's practice. Ankersmit concludes with a chapter on political history, which he maintains is the "basis and condition of all other variants of historical writing." Ankersmit’s rehabilitation of historicism is a powerfully original and provocative contribution to the debate about the nature of historical writing.

Author: Timothy M. Costelloe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521143675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.

Author: Emily Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107276268
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

Author: Ban Wang
Publisher:
ISBN: 0804728461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Throughout, the author seeks to delineate the ways the political masquerades as aesthetic discourse and aesthetic experience. Covering a wide range of material from fiction, poetry, aesthetics, and political discourse to memoirs, film, and historical documents, the book reconsiders a number of prominent cultural figures, including Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Mao Zedong, Zhu Guangqian, and Li Zehou. It also analyzes such important cultural features and events as Western influences on the formation of modern Chinese aesthetic discourse, modernist writings, Revolutionary Cinema, the Cultural Revolution, and New Wave Fiction.

Author: Robert L. Fowler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350198145
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Author: F. R. Ankersmit
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804739801
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, this book argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.