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Notes Introduction . For more on the music festivals during the Terror, see James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), chap. . For more on terror, the sublime, and the French Revolution, see Caroline Weber, Terror and Its Discontents: Suspected Words in Revolutionary France (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, ). . Johnson, Listening in Paris, . . Ibid., . . Edmund Burke, Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), II, sect. XVII, . Hereafter ESB. All further references will be given in the text. . Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [], ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, ). Hereafter KU. All further references will be given in the text. The translations are my own, though I have also consulted the translation by J. C. Meredith in The German Library series. See for this, ‘‘Critique of Judgment,’’ in Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, ), –. . I use ‘‘him’’ in this instance since Kant had a male subject in mind for the experiencing subject of the sublime. This is basically so because the Kantian experience of the sublime requires a well-developed reason, and in Kant’s phallogocentric perspective it is only men that should develop their reason and train themselves in the kind of spiritual autonomy that allows them to rise above the fears and desires attached to their sensuous, body-bound self. Indeed, Christine Battersby has remarked that for Kant a ‘‘man proves his superior moral excellence by his ability to experience the sublime.’’ See Christine Battersby, ‘‘Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics , Morality, and the Gendered Sublime’’ in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press), . . For more about the theological resonances of the landscapes of the sublime, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s classic Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite [] (New York: W. W. Norton, ); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, ); Claudia Bell and John Lyall, The Accelerated Sublime: Landscape, Tourism, and Identity (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, ). Notes to pages – . Neil Hertz, ‘‘The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,’’ in Romanticism, ed. Cynthia Chase (London: Longman, ), . . Petrarch climbed the two-thousand-meter-high Mont Ventoux in , describing the experience in a letter of April , . See ‘‘The Ascent of Mont Ventoux’’ [] in Petrarch: Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works, trans. Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. . Ibid., –. . Paul Guyer has already perceptively noted that the sublime with Kant must be ‘‘contrasted to nature rather than ascribed to it’’: the sublime experience is here not an experience of but an experience in opposition to nature. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime [] (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of California, ), . . Ibid., . . Ibid., . . See Theresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). . The term ‘‘existential sublime’’ derives from Paul Crowther and refers to the central (moral) aspect of the Burkean sublime: that it invigorates one’s sense of being alive: ‘‘a spectacle of mortality—of life under attack or threat—rejuvenates our sensibility . In such an experience, the present moment of consciousness—our very sense of being alive—is intensified into a felt quality, precisely because it is underscored by some actual or represented negation of life.’’ See Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . . This dynamic of tension and respite, or imminence and distance, was in fact already outlined by John Dennis in the early eighteenth century in his The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry. Thus, Dennis maintained that no passion is attended by a greater joy than terror, because this joy ‘‘proceeds from our reflecting that we are out of danger at the very same time that we see it [i.e., the terror-inspiring object or scene] before us.’’ This evidently antedates Burke’s famous dictum that terror (for him, as for Dennis, the strongest passion of all) can become delightful when ‘‘it is not conversant about the present destruction of the person’’ (ESB IV, sect. VII, ): when, that is to say, a threat is kept at bay and terror disappears into relief. See John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry [], in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press), :. Dennis’s significance to eighteenth-century theories of the sublime is little realized...
