Le saisissement à l'approche de l'infini :
This article discusses the implications of William Faulkner’s descriptions of “outrage,” and more particularly the astonishment experienced in the face of spatial immensity or absolute power. Could it be a modern version of the romantic or pre-romantic sublime, as defined in Edmund Burke’s...
Enregistré dans:
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Français |
| Udgivet: |
2004
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | This article discusses the implications of William Faulkner’s
descriptions of “outrage,” and more particularly the astonishment experienced
in the face of spatial immensity or absolute power. Could it be a modern
version of the romantic or pre-romantic sublime, as defined in Edmund Burke’s
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful? I shall contend that in
Faulkner’s fiction the character’s feeling of outrage is an experience which
has little influence on, or connection with, the other aspects of the subject’s
life, notably its ethical ones. In this respect, the Faulknerian feeling of
outrage contrasts with the mixture of astonishment and fear found in the
pre-romantic and romantic sublime, inasmuch as the sublime experience was never
truly severed from a sense of increased self-awareness and from a feeling that
the subject’s moral destination was partly revealed to him or her. Even if
Faulkner’s treatment of spatial immensity may be said to derive from the
romantic treatment of sublime landscapes, the feeling of outrage caused by such
landscapes remains a disruptive and ultimately meaningless experience, flashing
through the subject without enlightening him. |
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