Forms of the Sublime in Contemporary Anglo-American Novel and Cinema

Abstract

This thesis examines the aesthetic category of the sublime and explores its various modern forms in contemporary Anglo-American fiction and cinema. The theoretical chapter delineates concepts of the sublime starting with traditional forms such as the rhetorical and natural sublime, observes the concept's relationship to different media, and then explores relevant modern forms, including the sublate and the digital or technological sublime. The first analytical section explores how modern forms of the sublime based on disgust function in McCarthy's The Road and Cronenberg's The Fly. The second analytical part then examines Brooker's Black Mirror and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in the context of the technological and digital sublime.