No limiar da visão: a poética do sublime em Edmund Burke / On the Verge of Vision: Edmund Burkes poetics of the sublime
AUTOR(ES)
Daniel Lago Monteiro
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO
2010
RESUMO
This dissertation aims to make a discussion on how Edmund Burkes A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful introduces a new sense of the sublime, distinct from the one conceived by classical poetics and rhetoric, due to its opposition to the paradigm of clarity and pleasure. Once Burke portrays the sublime experience as being tinged with uncertainties, ambiguities and contradictions, where the objects of contemplation are only seen partially and obscurely, the experience he describes doesnt depend on the supremacy of vision and, as such, comprises the other senses. These questions are tackled by looking at the way the author rearrange three old dichotomies in classical thinking: pain and pleasure, body and mind, word and thing. In the first chapter we make a discussion on the grounds of Burkes sublime experience (the violent and mixed passions and the sense of self-preservation), and how pleasure and pain are no longer thought by the author as a loss and gain relation, but as truly and effectively oppositions. This is also shown in the pleasure the spectator feels while contemplating a scene from a real or a fictitious tragedy. In the second chapter, the descriptions of vast and boundless landscapes serve Burke as a further argument on the restricted role vision plays in the sublime experience. Incapable of setting the bounds to the contemplated object, the spectator sees himself winded in a game of expectation and surprise (stress and relief) which somehow resembles the rises and falls of a musical piece, or the breath movements of the body, created by buildings and landscape gardens. In the third chapter, we discuss Burkes attack on the opinion that words communicate and affect by sensible images. Disentangled from the image, or representation, words can then be seen as things, in their tangible, rough and irregular shapes. Poetry and rhetoric are also among the topics discussed in this chapter, especially from their contrast with painting, and from Burkes opposition to the humanistic Paragons principle.
ASSUNTO(S)
sublime visão sensibilidade edmund burke sublime edmund burke poética poetics vision sensibility
