The moment is religious because it also marks the limits of human conception, the point at which reason gives way to madness, certainty to uncertainty, and security to destruction. True sublimity occurs at “the point” where the distinctions between categories, such as cause and effect, word and thing, object and idea, begin to break down. Shaw, referring to Frances Reynolds’s 1785 Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, argues that When it comes to definitions of the sublime, my personal favorite is Philip Shaw’s – you might remember it from my post on the eternal now in Gothic fiction. In the Romantic period, a usual expression of the sublime was mountain peaks the realization of something far bigger and older than one’s self The Sublime in Literature as a “Point” Whenever we (vicariously, through the protagonist) experience the fuzzy passage between reason and emotion, between fear and awe, or between puzzlement and understanding, the sublime is there. In simple terms, the sublime in literature is every instance where we reach a threshold of ambiguity. Yet in another way, the sublime is no more than a ghostly reflection – and so, it’s not really prescribing but rather describing. In a way, the sublime in literature is a way of experiencing. Just as the Gothic itself – with which the sublime is heavily associated – that eludes clear-cut definitions, the sublime is not all that clear to put in a box. The difficulty in comprehending its ins and outs lies squarely in the fluidity of its definition. The sublime in literature (and art in general) is a fascinating but complex concept.
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