Sublime Case Study

Sublime—a theory and/or attitude toward beauty, nature, and spirituality marked by a combination of awe/pleasure and terror/fear inspired by natural beauty (usually of a huge, dark, and/or dangerous variety).

Your task is to compile a case study of the sublime in art, literature and music. Your examples should be from 18th Century Romanticism (Mary Shelley’s contemporaries) as well as more recent examples that demonstrate a contemporary understanding of the sublime (this understanding may have evolved).

You should have a minimum of four examples, two from historical Romanticism and two more recent examples (these can be artistic artifacts—photos, poems, songs—from your own life as well as published art, music, and writing).

The nature of your artifacts will dictate the format in which you present your case study.

• If all of your artifacts are music, you may want to submit a CD with a cover you design (can you make the cover a representation of the sublime?) and liner notes that identify the musical pieces and briefly explain how they illustrate the sublime.

• If your artifacts are visual, you may want to create scrapbook pages that include the images as well as brief explanations of how the images reflect the sublime. Can you make the pages look like a representation of the sublime as well as contain information about the sublime?

• If your artifacts are literary (poetry, passages from other literary works, etc) you may want to produce a small chap book with a cover you design and brief explanations of how the writing reflects an understanding of the sublime. Can you create a cover that also represents the sublime?

• If your artifacts are a combination of sound, image and words, you may want to create a wiki entry, webpage, or short movie. Be sure to include a brief explanation of how the artifacts represent the sublime.

Regardless of how you choose to present your case study, the final object that you submit should be a visual representation of the sublime as well as contain examples of the sublime (form should reflect content). Additionally, regardless of form, it should contain brief written (or spoken) explanations of how the artifacts illustrate the sublime and you should include your sources for the artifacts. How you include sources will depend on the format (on a webpage, you would use links, for a CD, scrapbook pages, movie, you would need an MLA formated list of sources).

Project due: Monday, December 15

header image: Shipwreck by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1805