ENGL / Comm 4103 Rhetoric & Persuasion

1. ENGL / Comm 4103Rhetoric & Persuasion Longinus: On the Sublime

2. The Sublime in Discourse “Sublimity . . . tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power at a single blow.” (347)

3. The Sublime: A Study in Style • What is the Sublime? • General Principles: • “Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse” (347). • The Sublime almost exclusively affects the emotions: • “Grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant” (347). • Sublimity is closely allied to literary criticism.

4. Obstacles to Sublimity • Longinus names four faults in discourse which are barriers to the Sublime: • Turgidity: • Bloated, bombastic writing. • “[H]e has not so much risen to the heights as been carried off his feet.” • Clitarchus “blows at his tiny flute, the mouth band off.” • Puerility: • Juvenile, immature, perhaps even silly writing. • False Emotion: • “Some people often get carried away, like drunkards, into emotions unconnected with the subject” (348) • Frigidity: • A “lapse from dignity” that arises from a single cause: the “desire for novelty of thought which is all the rage today” (349)

5. Marks of True Sublimity • Five sources of sublimity: • “The power to conceive great thoughts.” • “Strong and inspired emotion.” • Particular use of certain figures of thought and speech. • “Noble diction” including word choice and language use. • “Dignified and elevated word-arrangement.”

6. Some thoughts on Sublimity: “Nothing is truly great which it is great to despise” (349)

7. On Sublimity: “Words will be great if thoughts are weighty” (351).

8. On Sublimity: “Real sublimity contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong an ineffaceable impression on the memory” (350).