Tag Archives: the sublime

What Would Homer Say? Model Writers at Your Shoulder as a Tool for Writing Improvement

Imitation and emulation. The ancient Greek teacher Longinus is among the first persons to address what would become a recurrent theme in the history of rhetoric and literary criticism: the sublime (elevated emotion; ecstasy). His reflections on the sublime can … Continue reading

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Would Edmund Burke Have Approved of Artists Blending the Sublime and the Beautiful?

For Edmund Burke (1729-1797), in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), our strongest emotions are associated with danger, pain, and fear (most particularly the fear of death, the “king of … Continue reading

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Beauty That Is Also Repellent

Israeli artist Ori Gersht (b. 1967) says that one of the things he tends to aim for in his art is the foregrounding of beauty against a background of violence. In the video piece below, he sets up a traditional still … Continue reading

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To Boldly Go Where No Person Has Gone Before (from Your Computer)

Recently, an astronomer, using 3000 detailed photographs, reconstructed a panoramic meta-image of the Milky Way. You can now zoom upon and navigate the Milky Way in a fashion akin to using Google Earth. See the Milky Way meta-image here.

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Ah, Gray Sunflower, Forget Me Not! The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Moscow UFO Mothership/Cloud

When looking at the above video today, I thought of Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” (in which Ginsberg eulogizes a soot covered dead sunflower). And it made me think: what makes this UFO-like cloud (seen last Wednesday over Moscow) beguiling? And … Continue reading

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