Abstract

This dissertation studies the relation between aesthetic theories of the sublime and the theory and practice of drama. It examines the ways in which aesthetic theories fail to sustain their claims that the sublime is the mode of passage from sensory experience to the moral and rational spheres. The dramas and theories of the drama considered here that are based on the sublime either demonstrate a critical awareness of those failures or unknowingly reproduce them. ;Chapters one and two discuss Kleist's reading of the theory of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. They argue that his plays Penthesilea, as a linguistic tragedy, and Amphitryon, as a thematic comedy, enact Kleist's understanding of the ways in which linguistic disruptions cause the Kantian sublime to fail as an aesthetic mediation between the senses and the higher mental faculties. ;Chapter three presents Schiller's theories of the relations among language, drama, and the sublime. Schiller emphasizes the drama's aesthetic, experiential aspects and distances it from linguistic or poetic concerns. He appropriates the Kantian sublime in order to increase tragic affect by making tragedy sublime, as well as to justify tragedy by making it the mode of experiencing man's awareness of his moral superiority to nature. In spite of Schiller's explicit attempts to resolve the problems in Kant's formulation of the sublime, his own theory of the sublime is also marked by linguistic disruptions that prevent it from articulating aesthetic experience with moral sensibility. ;The final chapter on Adorno's reading of Wagner takes up in terms other than the sublime the contradictions between an aesthetic discourse of unity and synthesis and an artistic practice of agglomeration and fragmentation. Adorno uses the terms "symbol" and "allegory" to argue that the disarticulations on the formal compositional level of Wagner's music undo the articulating claims of his aesthetic theory. Aesthetic discourse in Wagner, as in Kant and Schiller, takes as an articulation what these readings reveal to be in fact a disarticulation