Recently, the notion of the sublime has received a new lease of life, enjoying attention from major writers as diverse as Harold Bloom to Jacques Derrida, and warranting interpretations in (quite aside from the expected fields of art and aesthetics) literary history, feminism, post-colonial theory, psychoanalysis, political theory and international relations. Before this, throughout the eighteenth century, the word ‘sublime’ had been in use to describe an aesthetic of incommensurability; it was the publication of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful in 1757 that cemented the term for art and philosophical aesthetics.
This symposium asks why the Sublime now? What is its legacy today? In what ways has the Sublime acquired an added urgency in our new millennium? And to what extent is this concept a useful or dangerous tool for the understanding of contemporary culture and history?
