The Sublime between Literature and Metaliterature in a Recent Interpretation

The paper discusses some aspects of James I. Porter's interpretation of the sublime in antiquity. The claim that tininess can be sublime is not confirmed by ps.Longinus' use of . Porter argues against the thesis that the sublime appeared suddenly in the first century BC but his approach to the history of the sublime in ancient rhetoric is flawed by a ps.Longinus-centred perspective. The origin of the metalanguage of the sublime could have been influenced by the lexicon of the sublime poetry, which was transferred, through critical 'attraction', to the metatext. The last two chapters deal with the material and the immaterial sublime; the category of the material sublime is somewhat problematic, for rhetoricians did not always class nature under the head of the sublime; in ancient rhetoric, nature takes on a sublime connotation only if undergoes an appropriate stylistic elaboration. Porter's analysis of the stylization of nature focuses exclusively on the thematic level disregarding the crucial role of style.