The sublime, the grotesque and the carnival

1. The sublime, the grotesque and the carnival MA 1 Terms and Concepts

2. Main theorists of the sublime • Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) • Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790)

3. Implied notions • The beautiful and/versus the sublime (concepts of „nature”) • Boundedness and boundlessness//form and formlessness • The physical and the metaphysical • „conversant with infinity” (Wordsworth) • The numinous (power/presence of divinity) – Kant • Transgression • Life and death

4. Effect of the sublime • Awe and admiration // fear and attraction • Sensibility and imagination • "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror” (Addison) • Burke: „negative pain” = delight (not the same as positive pleasure) • Recognition of boundedness/physicality from the perspective of infinity and vice versa – ambiguity • Threat of annihilation • Confrontation of the human with (in)finity

5. Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer over a Sea of Fog

6. Friedrich, The Chalk Cliffs of Rügen

7. Friedrich, The Sea of Ice

8. Turner

9. Turner

10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, „Mont Blanc” • All things that move and breathe with toil and sound • Are born and die, revolve, subside and swell. • Power dwells apart in its tranquillity • Remote, serene and inaccessible: • And this, the naked countenance of earth, • On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains, • Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep • Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, • Slowly rolling on; there, many a precipice • Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power • Have piled – dome, pyramid and pinnacle, • ...........................................................................

11. Percy Bysshe Shelley, „Mont Blanc” • Mont Blanc yet gleans on high: – the power is there, • ..................................................... • [...] The secret strength of things • Which govern thought, and to the infinite dome • Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! • And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, • If to the human mind’s imaginings • Silence and solitude were vacancy?

12. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein • “The valley assumed a more magnificent and astonishing character. [...] It was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings” (Fr 358) • Mont Blanc: “awful majesty” (Fr 362) • Arctic pole: “vast mountains of ice”

13. Post-romantic sublime • The technological sublime • Factories • Car/mobility (Futurists) • Aviation • War machinery • Computer technology • Questions of subjectivity

14. Battersea Power Station, London

15. Luigi Rossolo: Dynamism of a Car

16. Tullio Crali: Diving on a City

17. The grotesque: features 1 • Etymology: small cave; grotto (Roman ornaments) • Disfigured body • Bricolage • Animal and human • Misplacements • Incongruity • Monstrosity • Embarrassing/frightening intrusions/protrusions • Fantastic, strange, disgusting, ugly

18. The grotesque: features 2 • hidden demonic fantasy: torment and attraction • challenges ideals of proper order with dissonant elements • combination of terror, fear, beauty, and laughter • Complexity and uncertainty of tone • Revulsion/sympathy – (lack of) sense of comedy • Grotesque: no consolation (re: tragedy); nor full comic relief

19. The grotesque: instances • Gargoyles (the modern idea of the medieval) • Freak shows • Literary genres: satires; tragicomedies • Eastern European grotesque (absurd)

20. Gargoyles: Notre Dame church in Dijon

25. the brooding, romantic “mascot” for the city of Paris is [...] in part a virulently racist icon. Along with the only human among the fifty-four monsters—an old Jew—the hook-nosed demon is related to Viollet-le-Duc’s theories of racial inequality, having features that are more Semitic than satanic. In their massive muscularity and animality many of the animal monsters also recall the fear of the “dangerous” bestial laboring classes after the revolution of 1848.

26. Freak shows • Peak 1840-1940 • Diseases, genetic mutations, biological disorders • Cultural other (Hottentot Venus) • Human monstrosity • Giants, dwarfs • Conjoined twins, half-man/woman • Circus/Zoo (ethnological exposition) • Confirmation of the subject by gazingat/fixing Otherness

27. (David Lynch)The Elephant Man

28. The carnival(esque) • Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais and his World • Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel

29. The carnival: causes • Christian calendar • Carnival // lent • Body // denying the body • Significance of rules and regulations (the order of disorder/out of order) • Modernity (modern bourgeois subject) • Formalisation of work processes • Alienated bodies • Bourgeois neurosis (a result in itself)

30. Carnival: structure • Ritualistic inversion • Temporal and spatial limits • Centre and periphery • Merging of classes • Physical and imaginary periphery • Sea side (Brighton, Blackpool, Scarborough) • The Oriental (sexual phantasies) • Release from the (self-)discipline of the everyday • Authorised transgression – pretence to lead us beyond our limits • Subversion and liberation (implies the recognition of rules and order)

31. Carnival: modes of appearance • Medieval/Bakhtinian sense: no audience/spectacle (pageants, fairs – balls ) • Grotesque physicality, eccentricity • Inversion, sacrilege • Body (distorted, protruding, open) • Feasting • Laughter (the fool – unofficial but legalised) • Dirt/filth • Dissolution of boundaries between inside and outside • Masks (I as the Other; self-fashioning/construction)

32. Carnival/Lent • Penitent self-denial • Fasting • Denial of desire • Control • Self-imposed self-discipline • Carnival: • a means of fending off hysteria • or: end of festivities (Allon White) • Bulimic pattern

33. Moorish architecture in the Victorian age

34. Brighton Pavilion

35. „Venetian” carnival masks

37. Thank you for your attention!