Wallace Stevens and Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern sublime

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard's writings on the aesthetic of the sublime constitute a postmodern revision of classic theories of the sublime such as those of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. For Lyotard, postmodern sublimity is constituted by the inexpressibility of an artwork or text as event.It is argued that the poetry of Wallace Stevens embodies this postmodern sublime in several ways. Five "problematics" of Lyotard's postmodern sublime are presented: the sublime and the beautiful, imagination and reality, indeterminacy and nostalgia, sublime excess and ego construction, and the sublime and the avant-garde. Several of Stevens' poems are read with attention to these problematics, with special attention to "Credences of Summer," "The Comedian as the Letter C," "A Primitive Like an Orb," "The Man on the Dump," and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven."...