Le saisissement à l'approche de l'infini :
Guillain, Aurélie
Le saisissement à l'approche de l'infini : - 2004.
27
This article discusses the implications of William Faulkner’s descriptions of “outrage,” and more particularly the astonishment experienced in the face of spatial immensity or absolute power. Could it be a modern version of the romantic or pre-romantic sublime, as defined in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful? I shall contend that in Faulkner’s fiction the character’s feeling of outrage is an experience which has little influence on, or connection with, the other aspects of the subject’s life, notably its ethical ones. In this respect, the Faulknerian feeling of outrage contrasts with the mixture of astonishment and fear found in the pre-romantic and romantic sublime, inasmuch as the sublime experience was never truly severed from a sense of increased self-awareness and from a feeling that the subject’s moral destination was partly revealed to him or her. Even if Faulkner’s treatment of spatial immensity may be said to derive from the romantic treatment of sublime landscapes, the feeling of outrage caused by such landscapes remains a disruptive and ultimately meaningless experience, flashing through the subject without enlightening him.
Le saisissement à l'approche de l'infini : - 2004.
27
This article discusses the implications of William Faulkner’s descriptions of “outrage,” and more particularly the astonishment experienced in the face of spatial immensity or absolute power. Could it be a modern version of the romantic or pre-romantic sublime, as defined in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful? I shall contend that in Faulkner’s fiction the character’s feeling of outrage is an experience which has little influence on, or connection with, the other aspects of the subject’s life, notably its ethical ones. In this respect, the Faulknerian feeling of outrage contrasts with the mixture of astonishment and fear found in the pre-romantic and romantic sublime, inasmuch as the sublime experience was never truly severed from a sense of increased self-awareness and from a feeling that the subject’s moral destination was partly revealed to him or her. Even if Faulkner’s treatment of spatial immensity may be said to derive from the romantic treatment of sublime landscapes, the feeling of outrage caused by such landscapes remains a disruptive and ultimately meaningless experience, flashing through the subject without enlightening him.
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