From Parody to the Event; from Affect to Freedom: Observations on the Feminine Sublime in Modernism

The constellation of feminism, the sublime, and modernism is fraught with ambivalence, contradictions, and domination, if not sheer irrelevance. The fact that the sublime has disappeared as a key concept from the lexicon of modernism and the avant-garde is itself a symptom of the transformation of the literary field. This chapter begins with the claim that the tradition of the sublime challenges the dominance of historicism in so far as such aesthetics is associated with the crisis of empirical representation and causality. Yet this does not mean that the modernist sublime ignores history. On the contrary, it opens the possibility of rethinking the entrenched dualism between formalism and historicism in modernist studies. In this chapter, the author suggests three important implications of the sublime's proximity to abjection for feminist aesthetics.