The Threshold of the Sublime: Standing in Awe and Fear in Jose Maria Heredia's "En el Teocalli de Cholula"
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Date
2017
Authors
Jones, Briauna
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
My research explores the interactions between humans and nature as they appear in Cuban writer José María Heredia’s prose poem “En el Teocalli de Cholula.” I argue that María Heredia engages with the sublime by presenting a simultaneous awe and fear of nature. This analysis centers around a close reading of the selected poem and draws from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s conceptualizations of the sublime and contemporary, eco-critical approaches of Allen Carlson and Noël Carroll. Burke distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, but Kant provides a more critical and complex definition of the sublime in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, a more acute definition I use in my reading of María Heredia’s poem. In “Appreciation and the Natural Environment” Carlson offers three, near-emotionless, ways of viewing the aesthetics of nature while Carroll adds the importance of emotion to Carlson’s preferred model of appreciation in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. From this paper, readers will come to recognize that if they were to stand and look onto el Teocalli de Cholula, they too would be in the presence of the sublime. This research is significant as it crosses temporal and geographical boundaries to better understand the unique human experience of the sublime.
Description
9 pages
Keywords
Heredia, Jose Maria, Sublime, Nature