Longinus And Sublime

636 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Importance of effective writing

Longinus is a Greek critic of literature, he is refer to as Pseudo-Longinus or Dionysius-Longinus because his real name unknown. His important work is on the sublime; it is consist of 17 chapters talk about the effect of good writing and the figures of speech first published in 1554.

Longinus takes a pragmatic position. His main question is what is good writing and how may it be achieved?. His answer to this question is that good writing is what he calls sublime – it is apart of the good.
According to Longinus, sublime is a certain distinction and excellence in expression. Elevated language of the sublime aims to cast a spell over the audience in a delightful manner to the end desired by the writer. So good writing partakes of the sublime is consisted of elevated language, which takes the audience out of itself, and into someplace the writer has in mind.

Longmire's identifies three pitfalls to avoid on the search for sublimity.
1.Timidity, 2. Puerility and3. Parenthyrsus. Timidity tries to transcend the limits of sublime through false elevation and overbold. Language. Puerility is comprised of learning trifle parenthyrsys is the expression of false and empty, which is taken from the ugly growths in Literature. Longinus identifies three elements of sublime, which are 1.The power of forming great conceptions. 2.vehement and inspired passion. 3.the due formation of figures. 4. Noble diction and 5. The elevated composition.
He recognizes great art by ht presence of great ideas. Great idea in turn is conceived of great men. These great men will also be capable of deep and sincere feeling which transcends the mawkish emotion. The due of figures concern the ways, which elevated thought, and feelings may be best expressed. Noble l...

... middle of paper ...

...hows of the stage. The audience will be staying to the end of the play if he shows the customs of each age. He gives of super natural help and the importance of the chorus is a play. The play should have also five acts.

Finally, Horace considered the iambic meters for tragedy and comedy as the most suitable. He selected it because it is neared the spoken speech than any anther metro. In addition to this, Horace takes the progress of drama in Greece from the uncultivated days to the times of great masters. Horace give a comment on arc poetica on different aspects of the dramatic composition, his ideas in the theme, language, characters and the style of the drama have been taken from Aristotle. His views in the role of chorus, length of the play and the number of the speakers in a scene, guided a large number of writers for several generations in Europe.

Show More
Related

  • Dramatic Devices in Act 1 of An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley

    549 Words  | 2 Pages

    audience in his play. I will be analysing act one of the play to try

    Read More

  • Sublime Elements in Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

    1152 Words  | 3 Pages

    Another magical realist element is that when Tita was born, Nacha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor. On the floor was enough salt to fill a ten-pound sack that was used for cooking and lasted a long time (7). This element is more magical than sublime because this happening can not occur. However, it is a good example of sublime literature because it illustrates Longinus' notion of accumulation as a feature of sublime language. The salt from Tita's birth definitely dealt with accumulation.

    Read More

  • 'An Old Soldier Cleans His Rifle For The Last Time'

    1162 Words  | 3 Pages

    Every year, more than two million new works of literature are issued in the world. This number is, of course, no surprise, as literature has been, for many centuries, an extremely efficient way of communicating and telling stories. It is quite a challenge, however, to write an interesting, beautiful, and powerful piece of literature, yet analyzing it can be even harder. One piece of literature that, I believe, demonstrates these qualities is Magus Magnus’s poem, “An Old Soldier Cleans His Rifle for the Last Time.” The poem’s movement, for instance, is an important aspect to this work.

    Read More

  • Burke’s Sublime In O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins

    1196 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Out of the north deep waves rolled down upon the island. They broke against the rocks and roared into the caves, sending up white sprays of water. Before night a storm would certainly strike” (O’Dell, 19). This passage from Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins describes the Ocean that surrounds the island and characters in the story. In this description the narrator, Karana, shows the reader that the people on the island fear and respect the power of the Ocean. The Ocean is depicted throughout the novel as something enormous and powerful. The way the Ocean is seen demonstrates an example of the Burkeian Sublime. According to Burke, the Sublime is an experience that comes from authority and power. A common example for the Burkeian Sublime is looking at the power of mountains. Mountains are Sublime because they’re large in size, and have the power to kill people. Therefore, through looking at Burke’s requirements for the Sublime the conclusion is made that Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins contains the Burkeian Sublime.

    Read More

  • Understanding the the Romantic Imagination with Ramond, Wordsworth and Shelley

    1937 Words  | 4 Pages

    We have spent a good deal of this semester concentrating on the sublime. We have asked what (in nature) is sublime, how is the sublime described and how do different writers interpret the sublime. A sublime experience is recognizable by key words such as 'awe', 'astonishment' and 'terror', feelings of insignificance, fractured syntax and the general inability to describe what is being experienced. Perception and interpretation of the sublime are directly linked to personal circumstance and suffering, to spiritual beliefs and even expectation (consider Wordsworth's disappointment at Mont Blanc). It has become evident that there is a transition space between what a traveler experiences and what he writes; a place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. This space, as I have understood it, is the imagination. In his quest for spiritual identity Thomas Merton offers the above quotation to illustrate what he calls 'interpenetration' between the self and the world. As travel writers engage nature through their imagination, Merton's description of the 'inner ground' is an appropriate one for the Romantic conception of the imagination. ...

    Read More

  • Years in the Life of Francine Prose

    771 Words  | 2 Pages

    Myers, D.G. “In Praise of Prose.” Commentary Magazine May 2010: n. pag. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. .

    Read More

  • Relationship between Sublime and Magical Realism Explored in The Monkey

    1429 Words  | 3 Pages

    Scholars have traced the history of Sublime literature back to the third century literary critic Longinus. In his work Peri Hypsos, he lays the groundwork for the Sublime literature that still exists today. "Sublimity is always an eminence and excellence in language" (qtd. in Arensberg 3). "Excellence and eminence" are conveyed through rhetorical devices found in the text. Many of these devices are also found in works identified as Magical Realist works of literature.

    Read More

  • The Quest for the Ideal

    747 Words  | 2 Pages

    In brief, beauty is something that is aside from you. It is something you do not have to worry about. Nevertheless, we must be afraid of the sublime because we cannot understand it and therefore, is dangerous to us. We must at least decide is it poses as a danger to us. Just as Maureen Rousseau restated from Kant’s “Critique of Judgement” about the notion one can fear God without being afraid of him because we cannot resist God. It makes sense what Maureen Rousseau says when she explains that we can be fearful of the sublime but we can also determine if it something be afraid of. Maybe that is why we have the quest for beauty because we have nothing to fear from beauty. Beauty is ultimately something we admire and want.

    Read More

  • An Analysis of Marius the Epicurian and the Picture of Dorian Gray

    2343 Words  | 5 Pages

    As the great Philosopher Nietzsche proclaims boys always resembles their father. Thus I have analyzed the similarities and the traces of parents on their off-springs. And literary creations of them seem to me that they are the mirrors of their real selves. As Oscar Wilde reveals in De Profundis: "Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol." (93) so art symbolizes man. And his art is the symbol of his personality just as Marius the Epicurian is the symbol of Walter Pater's. Consequently, art harbours not only readers and life but also the creators of them. In fiction, Words speak two times; one reveals plot, the other reveals author; whatever a literary men writes, he writes himself but nothing else...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Emperor Concerto

    1504 Words  | 4 Pages

    Nevertheless, the sublime does not lead us to despair, but to a higher pleasure than beauty affords

    Read More

  • Comparing and Contrasting the Sublime

    1617 Words  | 4 Pages

    What can be said about the sublime? Class discussion led to the definition of sublime as the element found in travel literature that is unexplainable. It is that part of travel literature where the writer is in awe of his or her surroundings, where nature can be dangerous or where nature reminds a human being of their mortality. The term "sublime" has been applied to travel texts studied in class and it is hard not to compare the sublime from texts earlier in the term to the texts in the later part of the term. Two texts that can be compared in terms of the sublime are A Tour in Switzerland by Helen Williams and History of a Six Weeks' Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are similarities and differences found in both texts concerning individual perspectives of travel and the sublime. The main focus of this commentary will be comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Williams and Shelley within their respective texts, the language of the sublime and the descriptions of the sublime.

    Read More

  • “The Pieta” by Michelangelo

    1239 Words  | 3 Pages

    Just as other works that reflect art, pieces in the category of fine arts serve the important message of passing certain messages or portraying a special feeling towards a particular person, function or activity. At times due to the nature of a particular work, it can become so valuable that its viewers cannot place a price on it. It is not the nature or texture of an art that qualifies it, but the appreciation by those who look at it (Lewis & Lewis, 2008).

    Read More

  • Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime

    3544 Words  | 8 Pages

    Essentially, the heuristic function of the sublime is to expose reflective judgment (of which sublime feeling is a species) as the context in which the critical enterprise functions or as the "manner" in which critical thought situates its own a priori conditions. (7) The Kantian sublime may teach us something else: In an earlier work (1984), "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?," Lyotard views the sublime as legitimating the avant-garde as way of extending the critical enterprise to the arts. The method behind the madness of the avant-gardes, Lyotard contends, is incomprehensible unless one is already familiar with "the incommensurability of reality to concept which is implied in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.

    Read More

  • Edmund Burke Essay

    1198 Words  | 3 Pages

    In conclusion, the sublime and the beautiful are major topics in romantic poems and novels. Different authors bring out the different ways they can be seen and interpreted. In the novel Frankenstein and the poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, the sublime and the beautiful are shown through the feelings and the mind of the main characters. In the poem “Mont Blanc,” the sublime is shown through the complexity of nature and how man will never truly be able to understand it. In order to have something beautiful there must be something sublime, and in order for they’re to be something sublime there must be something beautiful.

    Read More

  • Aristotle’s Elements of Tragedy

    1479 Words  | 3 Pages

    Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1967. Dorsch, T. R., trans. and ed. Aristotle Horace Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism. New York: Penguin, 1965. Ley, Graham. The Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Reinhold, Meyer. Classical Drama, Greek and Roman. New York: Barrons, 1959.

    Read More

More about Longinus And Sublime

Open Document