Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime

Description

In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an "event" (temporal), from its conceptualization in terms of our failure to "cognitively map" the decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic structure of the postmetropolis (spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in terms of the new temporality of presence produced by network/real time (temporal). This volume explores the place of the sublime in contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural, and political values coded in it. It offers a map of the contemporary sublime in terms of the limits―cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological, technological, or environmental―of representation. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Editor’s Introduction 1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen 2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality 3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime 4 Of Fake and Real Sublimes 5 “Black and Glittering”: The Inscrutable Sublime 6 Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity 7 Recentering the Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches 8 Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime 9 The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime 10 From Diagrams to Deities: Evoking the Cosmological Sublime 11 Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-Century World: The Sublimein Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics 12 The Sublime as a Mode of Address in Contemporary EnvironmentalPhotography 13 Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema 14 Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime 15 The Birds and the Bees List of Contributors Index