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2. The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear In dismissing the nineteenth century’s ‘‘semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity ,’’’ T. S. Eliot in 1919 banished the sublime from the canonical discourse of literary modernism. Starting in the early 1970s, however, following the work of Harold Bloom, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Weiskel, the sublime returned both as an indispensable concept and as a positive value. JeanFranc ̧ois Lyotard made the sublime fundamental to his definition of postmodernism , and Paul Fry reoriented literary theory by displacing Aristotle with Longinus.1 We are now increasingly likely to agree that the disruptive force of the sublime works for the good both aesthetically and politically, exorcising the coercions of totalizing form and the totalitarianizing state. I participated in this movement that advances into the future by returning to romanticism, but I also have some trouble with it. The study of the sublime requires not only theoretical but also historical differentiations,2 and the complex subjectivity of the romantic sublime may be both a less obvious good and a less inevitable fate than it once seemed, requiring ongoing political debate. The history of the sublime in our cultural practices, our reading and our discourse of reading, is intimately bound up with what in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault explored as the genealogy of the ‘‘post-Christian soul,’’ a process in which Foucault located a decisive step around 1800. I have chosen two treatments of King Lear—the exemplary sublime drama—neatly spread around 1789, each a little over twenty years away: Charles Lamb’s ‘‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage-Representation’’ (1811) and the remarks on King Lear and on Shakespeare more broadly by Samuel Johnson (1765). Lamb’s essay, one of the rare romantic works that actually much used the term ‘‘sublime,’’ clearly displays the transfer of religious terms of value into a new psychological space.3 A second connection to present concerns in the history of our culture makes Lamb especially interesting, as I have signaled in my title: his detailed comparison of Shakespeare’s effects in two media, 24 The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear 25 print and stage. For in recent years, our sense of what ‘‘literature’’ is and its place among other cultural forms has been complicated, and shaken, by the tremendous growth of cultural production and transmission in film, video, radio, television, recorded sound media, and all the other nonprint media that nonetheless wield the power of the word. What kinds of power and what kinds of value do we attribute to these media? Such questions link British Marxist work, most notably exemplified in Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, with French poststructuralist work on representation, the archive , the simulacrum, grammatology, and many other modes of the nonoriginal .4 This is the matrix from which American cultural studies emerged. Looking back from these current questions to Lamb, whose essay marks an important moment in the history of the comparative valuation of media, I take my inspiration from ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ by Walter Benjamin, an earlier German cousin of the current British and French work just mentioned.5 Tightly bound in its method and concerns with his great essays ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’’ and ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ Benjamin’s essay is exemplary for relating a comparative analysis of media and their effects to the historical conditions of experience that constrain, but also enable, the production and reception of cultural works. It seeks both a relatively precise periodization and an analysis that focuses on the relations of aesthetics to politics. Benjamin argued that their mechanical reproducibility has caused artworks to lose the ‘‘aura’’ that characterized them in traditional culture. That aura derived from the works’ function in religious ritual, which distanced them from ordinary use and observation. But since printing, and most crucially since photography, mass availability has erased distance, and what was arcane has become familiar. One effect of this transformation has been first to bring into existence the category of the ‘‘aesthetic,’’ which did not apply when what we call ‘‘art’’ was wholly religious, and then to supersede that category just at the point it had become established, since the mass-reproduced work is no longer ‘‘art’’ as defined by aesthetics. As sketched here, Benjamin’s argument retains its intended polemical edge, but it cannot appear wholly convincing. Part of the value...

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