The force of the sublime: Lyotard, Beckett, Duras

The dissertation defends the claim that the aesthetic of the sublime, in its postmodern formulation by Jean-Francois Lyotard, is the most powerful aesthetic category that we have for understanding works of art and literature in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Chapter One describes the historical context of this world as characterized by a generalized survivor ethos. I develop this claim with reference to works by Robert Jay Lifton and Lyotard.In Chapter two, I make a detailed account of Jean-Francois Lyotard's thought on the sublime and argue that the sublime becomes a means by which art and literature can bear witness to the terrors and traumas of the historical realities of the modern world. Chapter three turns from the philosophical and theoretical account of the sublime, to an interpretation of Samuel Beckett's work in relation to the notion of the "worst." In Beckett's writing, the worst reconfigures the sublime. The Unnameable and Worstward Ho are the main texts that I study, but substantial time is also given to "The Capital of the Ruins," "Lessness," and Le Monde et le pantalon. Chapter four moves from Beckett to Marguerite Duras and a conception of the sublime as feminine. The experience of terror as manifested in modern traumas, both personal and communal, is figured by Duras through the sublime. I make the argument primarily through interpretations of La Douleur, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, L'Amant , and by reference to the work of Luce Irigaray, Speculum, de l'autre femme.The conclusion returns to Lyotard and his late conception of realism. I end the dissertation by suggesting that the sublime demands to be thought as a realism, a realism of the sublime, that attests to the failures, disasters, and traumas of history. The realism of the sublime is a realism of the differend.