From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature (review)

The aesthetic discourse of the sublime has enjoyed an enduring currency in comparative literature. One reason may be the theory's capacious ability to address a cluster of related concepts and aesthetic traditions, such as "the beautiful," terror, trauma, and romanticism. The sublime's productivity may also be due to its ability to put aesthetic, philosophical, social, and literary concerns on the same page. In short, the sublime can be wielded to address culture in historical change as a total landscape and mindset. And this is a shot in the arm for the shrinking field of literary studies. In the modern and postmodern conjunctures, the sublime speaks to crises of canons, culture, and society but also creates terrifying and apocalyptical imageries of destruction and rebirth. It is a strenuous attempt to ward off or contain threat or terror. This is another reason why scholars in comparative literature and Chinese studies are fascinated by the cultural study potential in the sublime.

My book The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (1997) is a comparative study of the sublime. Although many scholars draw on the sublime in discussing Chinese literature and film, there have been few comparative studies on the subject. Yi Zheng's book From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature is a new attempt to work the sublime by aligning European versions of the sublime with Chinese literary renovations. Zheng's book fills a gap in the comparative study of the anglophone notion of the sublime and in the sublime works of Guo Moruo. The author views the sublime as a cultural and aesthetic response to crisis-ridden modernity, which prevailed both in Europe and China. Modern crises overwhelm the psyche and break apart the traditional cultural fabric. The sublime steps into the fray. It not only registers this traumatic experience but also constructs strategies to cope with it, salvaging history from ruins. The author offers an expert analysis of Edmund Burke's Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, an understudied text in East-West comparative literature. She then moves to Wordsworth's poems and examines how Wordsworth snatches poetic, redemptive moments from anxiety and melancholy. This ability to snatch a redemptive moment attests on a larger scale to the sublime's supple and ingenious agency or mental acrobatics. The author contends that the aesthetic of the sublime, in the West and the East, constantly gets refigured and transformed across cultures because the sublime is capacious, making it well suited to the high demands of a crisis-ridden culture for emotional healing or reinforcement.

Crisis, in this study, is therefore pivotal to modern experience, and the sublime imagination or discourse proposes different responses in terms of aesthetic discourse and poetic works. The first part of the book gives an account of three different versions of the sublime in Edmund Burke, Kant, and Wordsworth. In Kant we can see the strenuous attempt to restore the superiority of rational humanism by installing subjectivity as a defensive, triumphant bulwark in the midst of cultural crisis and overwhelming threat. Burke displays a moral urgency to naturalize taste and convention. He treats aesthetic questions in terms of habitual agreement and know-how, in the long entrenched habit of mind, but universalizes the convention into a general human sensibility. This is an attempt to restore broken history to normalcy. The author sheds some light on the political aspects of Burke. The English philosopher's obsession with terror in theatrical spectacle is read as reaction to the turbulent colonial landscape of eighteenth-century Ireland. In the figuration of public execution Burke sees the most exemplary events as dramaturgy of the real. Orchestrating terrible actions in history into theater and spectacle, the sublime becomes the theatricality of the real. On the other hand, Burke leans more toward the beautiful and advocates maintaining the [End Page...