ABSTRACT
Postmodern culture, which roughly spans the period from the 1940s to the present day (see Connor 1989), takes a lively interest in the sublime. It differs from Romanticism, however, in its sceptical attitude to overarching master concepts, such as nature, reason, or the divine. As the cultural critic Fredric Jameson argues, in his canonical essay ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (1984), postmodernism is characterised by its rejection of systematic philosophies, by its abandonment of authenticity and expressionism, and by its subsequent investment in arbitrariness, artificiality, and ‘the waning of affect’ (1991: 16). As far as sublimity is concerned, whilst postmodernism retains the Romantic feeling for the vast and the unlimited, it no longer seeks to temper this feeling through reference to a higher faculty. The postmodern condition therefore lays stress on the inability of art or reason to bring the vast and the unlimited to account. In what amounts to a retreat from the promise of enlightenment, its dream of freedom and transcendence, the postmodern affirms nothing beyond its own failure, and it does so without regret and without longing. Postmodernism therefore avoids not only the Romantic belief in the ability of art to synthesise noumena and phenomena, but also the modernist attitude of mourning for the loss of this belief.
