What is the Sublime?

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
ACKNOWEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION

PART I: Sublime Beginnings
1. Longinus, Peri hupsous, and the Sublime in Antiquity
2. Basilios Bessarion and the (Re)discovery of Peri hupsous
3. The Sublime in Renaissance Europe and Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux's Traite
4. "Steal My Thunder!": John Dennis and the Sublime's Swerve into Theistic Passions and Terrors
5. The Sublime Through the Lens of Eighteenth-Century British Critics
6. Kant: The Final Arbiter of the Sublime?
7. Incoherencies, Fallacies, and Parallel Readings: Arguments Against Modern Theories of the Sublime (Sircello and Forsey)

PART II: Je ne sais quoi as Sunyata: An Inquiry into Two Parallel Theses (or, The Reality of Non-Existence)
8. Is Sunyata (Emptiness) the Key to the Sublime?
9. Parallel Readings: Discourses on the Sublime, Discourses on Sunyata
10. Nihilism, Eternalism, and Sunyata: The Middle Way Between Extremes
10.1: The Long Debate Beginning with Parmenides
11. The Dialectic of Nihilism and Emptiness
11.1. Heidegger and das Nichts
11.2. Sartre and le neant

PART III: Sunyata, the Sublime, and the Visual Arts
12. The (Re)emergence of the Sublime in Post-World War II New York: The Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s
13. Danto, Newman, and Rothko: The Modern/Postmodern Sublime
14. Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, and Wolfgang Laib
14.1. Agnes Martin: Sublimely Unemphatic
14.2. Robert Rauschenberg: "I try to act in that gap..."
14.3. Wolfgang Laib: "There is no beginning and no ending..."

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX