Often labelled as "indescribable," the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: · The legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the post-modern and avant-garde sublimity · The major theorists of the sublime (...) such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each · The significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era · How the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch's neo-noir This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory. (shrink)

We developed a technique to examine the effects of emotional content and context on verbal memory. Two sets of sentences were devised: in the first, each sentence was emotionally arousing due to the inclusion of an emotional “target” word. In the second set, “targets” were replaced with well-matched neutral words. Subjects read aloud a selection of emotional and neutral sentences, and were then surprised with memory tasks after a range of time delays. Emotional target words were remembered significantly better than (...) neutral words in all experiments. Recognition of emotional words was relatively stable despite increasing delays between encoding and recognition testing, in contrast to memory for neutral words, which decayed over time. Memory for neutral non-target words was enhanced when words had been presented in an emotional context. The results confirm the phenomenon of emotional enhancement of memory at short and long delays and suggest that emotional context may be encoded independently of word meaning. (shrink)

Determining the brain properties that make people ‘brainier’ has moved well beyond early demonstrations that increasing intelligence correlates with increasing grey and white matter volumes. Both structural and functional in vivo neuroimaging techniques delineate a distributed network of brain regions, perhaps with a focus in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which varies in extent and connectivity with individual differences in intelligence. Longitudinal studies further show that the neuroanatomic correlates of intelligence are dynamic, changing most rapidly in early childhood. Several promising candidate (...) genes affecting neuronal development and neurotransmission have been proposed that might begin to explain the marked genetic overlap between cortical morphology and intelligence. A major future challenge is to determine the cellular events that underpin the neuroanatomic differences correlated with intelligence. BioEssays 29:962–973, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)