Contenu du sommaire : Le sublime en question

This article confronts Melville's Pierre or the Ambiguities with the three most vital essays on the sublime that the author may have read (Longinus, Burke and Kant). Its purpose is to successively unveil possible links among those theoretical texts and between them and the novel, bringing out inner concurrences and paradoxes. Eventually, it shows that however indebted to the aesthetics of the sublime, the work also corrodes them by resorting to irony and thus achieves the ambiguity it announced.

A dominant mode in mid-XIXth century American painting, the
sublime does not involve following a specific program for representing
landscape. What it does entail, however, is a peculiar type of relationship
between the painter and his pictures. This article discusses the case of
The Icebergs by F. E. Church to show
how this national icon originates in the “sublime repression” of the painter's
self.

This article discusses the implications of William Faulkner's
descriptions of “outrage,” and more particularly the astonishment experienced
in the face of spatial immensity or absolute power. Could it be a modern
version of the romantic or pre-romantic sublime, as defined in Edmund Burke's
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful? I shall contend that in
Faulkner's fiction the character's feeling of outrage is an experience which
has little influence on, or connection with, the other aspects of the subject's
life, notably its ethical ones. In this respect, the Faulknerian feeling of
outrage contrasts with the mixture of astonishment and fear found in the
pre-romantic and romantic sublime, inasmuch as the sublime experience was never
truly severed from a sense of increased self-awareness and from a feeling that
the subject's moral destination was partly revealed to him or her. Even if
Faulkner's treatment of spatial immensity may be said to derive from the
romantic treatment of sublime landscapes, the feeling of outrage caused by such
landscapes remains a disruptive and ultimately meaningless experience, flashing
through the subject without enlightening him.

This article takes for its starting point the hypothesis that De
Lillo's interest in the sublime can be first and foremost assimilated to an obsession with setting a limit to the novel. The multiple forms taken by the sublime (forms of the uncertain or the impossible, openly constrained, forced, fabricated) invariably mark a limit in the narrative to be followed by a subsequent reflection on the commerce between representation and infinity in the world. If words cannot express the sublime, the ambivalent forms (the unstable, infinite regression, the virtual) found in novels like White Noise, Libra and Mao II reveal the problematics of its event.

Based on Slavoj Žižek's reading of Hegelian and Lacanian theories, this article analyses the concept of the sublime in the filmic work of one of today's most prominent filmmakers : David Lynch. We intend to show that the sublime in Lynch's pictures can be described in terms of what the narrative (the field of representation) fails to represent, to make sense of or to assimilate, that is to say what, by quoting Lacan, Žižek defines as the Real : the emptiness, the central impossibility embedded in the reality principle.