ABSTRACT
The book opens with Jump Number 10, a short story about a man who bungee jumps every year in an attempt to connect with those who died in the attacks of September 11. The story helps frame the opening discussion about sublimity in the 21st century and establish a connection between this sublimity and terror. Throughout the rest of the introduction, key theorists of the sublime are explored from Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke to Jean-François Lyotard, whose term ‘the melancholic sublime’ is used in order to begin to articulate the underlying nostalgia that, the book argues, characterizes the response to terror in the 21st century. The introduction links these ideas to Bruce Robbins’ conception of what he calls ‘the sweatshop sublime,’ which encapsulates our confrontation with the forces of global production and consumption. The end of the introduction seeks to lay the platform for the rest of the book and answers the question of why such a book is needed, suggesting that our nostalgic response to both terror and the global represents, perhaps, one of the greatest challenges to forward thinking, today.
