Provides new perspectives on women's print media in interwar Britain

Today, the sublime has again become the focus of sustained reconsideration, but now for its epistemological and ontological--or presentational--aspects. As an unmasterable excess of beauty, the sublime marks the limits of representational thinking. These essays will be indispensable reading for anyone whose work is concerned with the sublime or, more generally, with the limits of representation, including philosophers, literary scholars and art historians.

Beckett's novel Molloy and the question how this work evokes a particular kind of feeling associated with its exhibition of meaninglessness, namely the feeling of the sublime, is the point of departure for this study. Kant's theory of the sublime is interpreted within the framework of his aesthetic and moral theories, suggesting a way to understand the claim to universal validity for aesthetic judgements. Kant claims that the judgement of the sublime serves morality but he fails to provide this link, so a theory of how this aesthetic judgement can contribute to the cultivation of moral character is developed. It is argued that Kant held that art, including narrative art like the novel, can be sublime. Kant's theory of the sublime is shown to be relevant for modern works of art, and the application of this Kantian framework throws new light on the discussion of the moral aspects of Beckett's literary work. According to this account, Molloy is a sublime work of art, and despite its amoral content can serve the reader's moral cultivation.

This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.

We call sublime those things and experiences supposed to be the very best. But what if the best actually leads to inequality and exploitation? Williams critiques the sublime over its long history and in recent returns to sublime nature and technologies. Deploying a new critical method that draws on process philosophy, he shows how the sublime has always led to inequality. This holds true even where it underpins ideas of cosmopolitan enlightenment, and even when refined by Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Zizek. Against the unjust legacies of the traditional sublime, James Williams defends a new, anarchist sublime: multiple, self-destructive and temporary; opposed to any idea of highest value to be shared by all but always imposed on the powerless.

Original Scholarly Monograph

Detailed new account of the historical emergence and conceptual reach of the sublime both before and after Longinus.

The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime is first of all the detailed reading of David LynchÕs The Lost Highway, based on the premises of Lacanian psychoanalysis. LynchÕs unique universe of the Òridiculous sublimeÓ is interpreted as a simultaneous playful staging and traversing of the fundamental ideological fantasies that sustain our late capitalist society. A master of reversals, Zizek invites the reader to reexamine with him easy assumptions, received opinion, and current critical trends, as well as pose tough questions about the ways in which we understand our world and culture. He offers provocative readings of Casablanca, SchindlerÕs List, and Life Is Beautiful in the process of examining topics as diverseÑand as closely linkedÑas ethics, politics, and cyberspace. Slavoj Zizek, a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, is the author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchock) and In Defense of Lost Causes, among many books. Marek Wieczorek is assistant professor of modern art history at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the author of The Touch of Light: Laser Paintings by Carel Balth.

Renowned architect Eberhard Zeidler tells his story in a two-volume book that explores his early life in Germany and his years in Canada after he moved there in 1951. Architect of Toronto's Eaton Centre and Trump International Hotel and Tower, Zeidler has left his stamp on the urban landscape of Canada, the United States, and the rest of the world.