Abstract
In his article "Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept" Vrasidas Karalis explores the notion of sublime or sublimity as the field of colliding signifiers and of experiential frameworks in conflict. Instead of treating the traditional notion as a structural element of style of ideology, he analyses it from the point of its contextual validation and its very historicity: what makes sublimity emerge is the extra-lingual unease, the existential dysphoria of the world outside the text, as refracted through specific works of art. Such dysphoria is expressed through ungrammatical language or/and through the attempt in specific moments in history to reclaim a "totalising vision of experience." Through examples from various cultures Karalis addresses the difference of sublime perceptions that we see around the world. Ultimately, Karalis returns to Pseudo-Longinus's Peri Hypsous in order to explore sublimity as an expression of cultural and existential othering as an attempt to foreground the innovative differentiation in experience.
Recommended Citation
Karalis, Vrasidas.
"Disambiguating the Sublime and the Historicity of the Concept."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
12.4
(2010):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1671>
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