Ernst Bloch, tiny daydreams

Cora Stam — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:29:10 +0000

Today I made a start with reading Ernst Bloch’s masterpiece in three volumes, Das Prinzip Hoffunun (1959)

After the introduction Bloch begins with the dreams and ideals of the adolescent. The seventeen years old lad who fantasizes about a date with the most beautiful girl in town.

Somehow it nicely fits with Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1922) and his main figure Denis, twenty three years and desperately trying to be a (successful) writer…

The Sublime

Cora Stam — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:37:53 +0000

The sublime, which Edmund Burke examines in his major work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is one of the most intriguing terms in the field of aesthetic judgements. It suggests grandeur, vastness, awe and immense power when invoked to define the quality of a great literary or artistic work. The Greek philosopher Longinus described the sublime as an “excellence in language” and as the “expression of a great spirit”. (On Sublimity, written in the first century C.E.) The term is associated as well with frightening and with huge phenomena in nature (vulcanoes, storms, lightning, avalanches).

Is the sublime a fact about nature or art, or both? Is the sublime a property of the work… or is it less in the work than in the soul or character of the genius who produces the work?

Or could we say that the sublime is an extraordinary experience brought about the power of the perceiver, and thus a testimony not to the work or to the author but to something in the reader?

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Ernst Bloch, tiny daydreams

The Sublime