"In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an ""event"" (temporal), from its conceptualization in terms of our failure to ""cognitively map"" the decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic structure of the postmetropolis (spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in terms of the new temporality of presence produced by network/real time (temporal). This volume explores the place of the sublime in contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural, and political values coded in it. It offers a map of the contemporary sublime in terms of the limits—cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological, technological, or environmental—of representation."
Editor’s Introduction [Temenuga Trifonova] 1. The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen [Adrian Ivakhiv] 2. Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality [Paul Coates] 3. The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime [James Kirwan] 4. Of Fake and Real Sublimes [Temenuga Trifonova] 5. ‘Black and Glittering’: The Inscrutable Sublime [Barbara Stafford] 6. Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity [Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe] 7. Recentering The Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches [Elizabeth Oldfather] 8. Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime [Lyuba Encheva] 9. The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime [Ksenia Fedorova] 10. From Diagrams to Deities: Evoking the Cosmological Sublime [Hannah Goodwin] 11. Feeling Not at Home in the 21st Century World: The Sublime in Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics [Sandra Shapshay] 12. The Sublime in Environmental Photography [Damian Sutton] 13. Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema [Stella Hockenhull] 14. Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime [Joseph Gabriel] 15. The Birds and the Bees: The Gendering of the Sublime [Bill Beckley]
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Reviews for Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime
"""This collection brings the sublime back to where it belongs, the centre of modern critical thinking in fields that are much broader than that of philosophy and art history. It helps understand why we need the sublime as a transdisciplinary toolset that brings together issues of ecocriticism, posthumanism, cultural policy, and digital culture."" --Jan Baetens, University of Leuven"
