Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)

Attila Debreceni: The Notion of the "Sublime" in Contemporary English, French and Hungarian Literary Criticism

4 ATTILA DEBRECZENI of the sublime do not assume a unified subject: they resist, such a concept".

1

2 Thus he considers the conceptual boundaries of the notion of the sublime extremely uncertain, whereby he finds another approach: "the autonomous subject, a conteptualization of human subjectivity based on the self-determination of the subject and the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, is the product of a set of discourses present to the period 1756—63, the period of the Seven Years War."

1' He calls this group of discourses "discoursive network", and treats sublime as a part of this interpreting it as two kinds of discourse. "I have used a distinction between two kinds of discourse: the first, a discourse on something, is to be taken as a discrete discourse, a discourse which is to be read in a highly specific way, within a very well defined context. [...] This discourse on something is to be distinguished from a discourse of something. [...] the discourse of something may well subsume a large number of discrete discourses."

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4 Thus the notion of the sublime may lose its unifying capability whereby it becomes possible for the extremely rich context to be comprehended. The uncertain outlines of the sublime are reflected by the division of the reader containing essays which was edited by Peter de Bolla and Andrew Ashfield.

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3 After the introduction of the Longinian tradition at the beginning of the XVII

Ith century passages entitled RJjapsody to RJjetoric were selected from the whole century which were only very loosely joined. The most common feature shared by them seems the moral-philosophical question and search for ways of expression. The part cited from Samuel Johnson's dictionary is illuminating in terms of the immanent divergence of the concept as it describes 14 meanings within the 6 word class variants of the sublime. The lack of unified classification comes from the very concept of the notion of the sublime as it cannot be treated as a unified discourse. Similar ideas can be observed in Pierre Hartmann's approach as well: "nous avons vu se déployer quatre types de discours assez nettement différenciés pour qu'il paraisse possible de les identifier et de les nommer. Ce furent, respectivement, les discours poétiques, esthétiques, 1

2 The Discourse of the Sublime

, Oxford, 1989, 293. 1

3 Op. cit., 6. 1

4 Op. cit., 9-10. 1

3 The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth - Century Aesthetic Theory.

; Cambridge University Press, 1996.