The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a...

"Scapeland: Writing the Landscape from Diderot's "Salons" to the Postmodern Museum" is a comparative, interdisciplinary study tracing theories of the sublime and a history of spectatorship from Diderot's eighteenth-century French "Salons," through art criticism by Baudelaire and Breton, to Jean-Fran ois Lyotard's postmodern exhibition "Les Immat riaux." In the "Salons," an exploration of the painted landscape becomes an encounter with both the limits of representation and the infinite possibilities of fiction. Baudelaire and Breton explore similar limits in their work, set against the...