The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory SatiristsThis book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--"doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing. The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents. |
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Page xxiii
... rational vocation. Neil Hertzsimilarly argues that the sublime object, in all its disruptive power, always acts as “the guarantor of the self's own integrity as agent,” “a confirmation of the unitary status of the self”: “A passage to ...
... rational vocation. Neil Hertzsimilarly argues that the sublime object, in all its disruptive power, always acts as “the guarantor of the self's own integrity as agent,” “a confirmation of the unitary status of the self”: “A passage to ...
Page xxiv
... rational, metaphysical, patriarchal, or more vaguely cultural, has been questioned by those who see the experience as a form of genuine instability. Steven Knapp insists that in Kant's account, the subject explicitly fails to identify ...
... rational, metaphysical, patriarchal, or more vaguely cultural, has been questioned by those who see the experience as a form of genuine instability. Steven Knapp insists that in Kant's account, the subject explicitly fails to identify ...
Page xxv
... rational standards it seeks to uphold: the rational idealization of thought makes thought necessarily uncertain, like the ice on which Wittgenstein's satirized philosopher tries to walk. Sublime experience neither snugly enlists the ...
... rational standards it seeks to uphold: the rational idealization of thought makes thought necessarily uncertain, like the ice on which Wittgenstein's satirized philosopher tries to walk. Sublime experience neither snugly enlists the ...
Page xxvi
... rationally solve or answer skepticism. It occurs only because skepticism is unanswerable. His sublime narrative at the “Conclusion of this book” (book I of the Treatise)— as he ventures “upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into ...
... rationally solve or answer skepticism. It occurs only because skepticism is unanswerable. His sublime narrative at the “Conclusion of this book” (book I of the Treatise)— as he ventures “upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into ...
Page xxvii
... rational confidence into skeptical despair as a narrative trajectory, they also present the intellects of those whom they satirize as always divided between dogmatic certainty and doubting alienation: as Pope says in the Dunciad, the ...
... rational confidence into skeptical despair as a narrative trajectory, they also present the intellects of those whom they satirize as always divided between dogmatic certainty and doubting alienation: as Pope says in the Dunciad, the ...
Contents
xvii | |
Rochester Dryden and the Skeptical Origins of Sublimity | xlvii |
3 Civil Enthusiasm in A Tale of a Tub | lxxxv |
An Essay on Man and the Limits of the Sublime Tradition | cxi |
5 Popes Imitations of Horace and the Authority of Inconsistency | cxliii |
6 Knowing Ridicule and Skeptical Reflection in the Moral Essays | clxxi |
7 Modernity and the Skeptical Sublime in the Final Dunciad | cxcv |
Notes | 209 |
Bibliography | 245 |
Index | 261 |
Other editions - View all
The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists James Noggle Limited preview - 2001 |
The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists James Noggle Limited preview - 2001 |
Common terms and phrases
absolute Academic skepticism Adam’s admiration aesthetic Alexander Pope ancient Apology appears argues argument assertion atheism attitude authority Bolingbroke boundless Cambridge Carneades Cartesian Cavell claim contradiction critical Critique of Judgment cultural Descartes Descartes’s discourse divine dogmatic Dryden Dulness Dulness’s dunces Dunciad eighteenth-century epistemological Epistle Essay Essay’s expression finds God’s Heav’n Horatian human idea ideological imagination inconstancy insists intellectual ironic irony Jacobite judgment Kant literary Longinian Longinus Longinus’s Man’s Milton mind mind’s mitigated skepticism modern Montaigne Montaigne’s moral nature Oxford Paradise Lost Pascal passage passions philosophical poem poem’s poet poetic poetry political Pope's Pope’s position Pyrrhonism Pyrrhonistic radical rational reason religious Rochester Rochester’s satirical satirists says seems sense Shaftesbury skep skeptical doubt skeptical sublime social society Soul Stanley Cavell Steven Knapp sublime sublime experience Swift Tale Tale’s taste things thought tion Tory truth University Press virtue Wharton Whig Whig Junto Whiggish women writing