Brandeis University
Spring semester, 2003
ENG 171A: History of Literary Criticism
Miles Rind
January 28, 2003

      Reading: Longinus, On the Sublime, chapters I–XV (CT, 75–86), XXII.1 (CT, 88), XXXIII (CT, 92–93), and XXXVI (CT, 94).

      Question: In chapter XIV, Longinus says that whenever we are “elaborating anything which requires lofty expression and elevated conception,” we “should shape some idea in our minds as to how perchance Homer would have said this very thing, or how it would have been raised to the sublime by Plato or Demosthenes or by the historian Thucydides” (CT, 84a). Why does Longinus think that this will be of help? (Be sure to take account of what he says in the preceding chapter!)

      Questions for thought and discussion:
      1. What does Longinus mean by “the sublime” or “the elevated”? (These two expressions are translations of the same Greek word, hupsos.)
      2. Longinus claims to be showing that there is an art (technê) of the sublime (ch. II, p. 76b). Yet the most important factor in producing sublime utterances, according to his account, seems to be an inborn “power of forming great conceptions” (ch. VIII, p. 79a), or more simply “greatness of soul” (ch. XV, p. 86a). What, then, is the role of art in his account?
      3. In what way is sublimity, according to Longinus, a matter of “nature”? (See especially ch. XXXVI, but the connection is stated or implied in numerous places.)