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(2017
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2017 #2b: Short Essay (Favorite Term) |
LITR 4328 |
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Ronni Abshier
Sublime: Not Just a Scary Good Band Name
Before beginning this class I didn’t really have a working definition of
the term “sublime” because the only time I had really ever heard it was on the
radio and in reference to beauty and excellence. Due to this, it was a surprise
to find out that in reference to the American Renaissance and Romanticism, the
term “sublime” means something that is a blend of beautiful and terrifying.
Texts such as Ligeia and
Rip Van Winkle are excellent examples
of the term which help the reader truly understand the sublime as beautifully
terrifying.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia,
there are quite a few examples of the sublime.
Poe speaks of his lover’s “infinite supremacy” as he refers to how smart
she is, an idea that her knowledge is a reason he loves her even if he should be
threatened by his inferiority to her. Rather than only being applied to the
intangible, Poe also speaks of the sublime in reference to physical objects,
like walls that were so tall they loomed over him in a way that made him weary
of them, and his lover’s post-mortem tremors that hint at death as an
exclamation point, rather than a period, as his brain struggles to understand
what he has seen. In both of these instances, Edgar Allan Poe uses the sublime
to exaggerate things and excite the reader while simultaneously frightening him
or her.
In Rip Van Winkle by
Washington Irving, there are also some great examples of the sublime as well,
but none so much as Irving’s descriptions of Rip’s ascent up the mountain. Rip
noticed a thunderous sound and began to describe the mountain he was treading
on. He describes the deep ravines,
lofty rocks, the high impenetrable wall that the rocks created, and the branches
through which you could only catch glimpses of an azure sky and bright evening
clouds. The description was so vivid and alluring that there’s almost a sense of
foreboding in it. It’s almost as if the mountain was warning Rip of the strange
things in store for him.
The sublime is a cornerstone to understanding romance in literature.
Because of this, it is helpful that authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Washington
Irving intertwine the concepts so well with their stories, making the concept
easy to grasp and develop an understanding. Poe’s gothic horror-based sublime
and Irving’s fantastical and foreboding scenery sublime individually create
similar definitions of the term in very different ways.
