Authors:

Shane O'Connell

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The sublime as an aesthetic category is concerned with the vast power and scale of the natural world. It deals with that which is insurmountable or incomprehensible relative to humanity. However, as humankind's relationship to the natural world changes, so too does our relationship to the insurmountable and incomprehensible. The sublime takes its form around this historical and individual dependency. The climate crisis, in its modern instantiation, possesses inherently sublime qualities in that it far exceeds the individual in scale and temporality. The sublime thus acts, I argue, as a progenitor of the climate crisis: obscuring its effects and furthering catastrophe by making the crisis appear beyond human intervention. The climate crisis can be thought of as a synthetic sublime that is culturally produced and obscured. Understanding the sublime's role in climate change elucidates this obscurity. To make sense of this sublime influence I turn both to modern theoretical work and the Romantics' conception of sublimity.  Diverse Chinese Masculinity: Examining the Party-State's impact on Domestic Chinese Films Olivia Olsen

Source:

UC Davis / English / 2024

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Co-authors:

Shane O'Connell