Sublimations of the sublime : boundaries of Romanticism in Modern painters

This dissertation examines John Ruskin's reaction against and within Romantic aesthetics. Specifically, it analyzes Ruskin's rejection of the rhetoric of the sublime even as he covertly fashions his own sublime mode of expression. Ruskin reacts against the Wordsworthian model because of its egotism and its problem with the pathetic fallacy, substituting for Wordsworth's humanization of nature a more scientific, critical and objective perspective. Yet Ruskin ultimately undermines his own scientism in volume one by revealing the limitations of human perception in contemplation of the infinite and mysterious recesses of nature. The gap which Ruskin uncovers between the knowledge which scientific inquiry yields and that which the intuitions of the infinite suggest is bridged by his own Wordsworthian effusions, creating a particularly Ruskinian sublime. Ruskin's classification of the sublime under the rubric of the beautiful, the powerful and the imaginative is another of his efforts to reject Romantic aesthetics and revert to eighteenth century notions of the continuity between the beautiful and sublime as order, unity and purity. The association of the beautiful with the sensuous, however, popularized by Edmund Burke, increased the difficulty of Ruskin's task. The penetrative imagination, a faculty which is supposed to reveal beauty, reveals, instead, the failure of perception and thus, the negative sublime. Penetrative imagination is symbolized as the serpent, the double of the sensuality of beauty it opposes. The later volumes of Modern Painters widen the gap between the scientific emphasis on patient, painstaking observation of physical fact and the mythological understanding of the factual world of nature. This gap is signified by the indeterminacy of the overdetermined images of the cloud and the serpent. In these later volumes, as well, an anti-Germanic rhetoric intensifies. Ruskin's growing hostility towards German aesthetics is another reaction against Romantic subjectivism as well as against Evangelical pieties Ruskin felt he had outgrown.