The sublime and the 'civilized' subject: History, painting, and Cook's second voyage.

摘要

This dissertation examines a number of images by William Hodges from Cook's second voyage in relation to the eighteenth century discourse on the sublime. While the encounter with the sublime inaugurates and empowers the "civilized" subject, I argue that it is also characterized by another movement: a sublime upon a sublime, which interrupts this teleological end, diverting it to more ambiguous goals and displacing the subject's sense of empowerment by an apprehension of power's instability. I propose, furthermore, that the scene of the sublime has geographical and cultural, as well as historical, settings: it "happens" in the encounter with others on "beaches" in faraway places. In my introduction, I outline this double movement of the sublime. In chapter one, I look at Hodges's "landing" paintings, suggesting that they allegorize the "turn" in the aesthetic ideology of Reynolds's Discourses in which the aspiration to a certain kind of sublime---the classical ideal of universality in painting---is interrupted and, in effect, derailed by the intuition of another which exactly overshadows the first. In chapter two, I analyze two paintings by Hodges based on an encounter with a Maori family in Dusky Bay New Zealand in conjunction with the film Once Were Warriors. Both narratives, despite their disparities, are about the transformation from "savagery" to "civility" (figured in the ideal of the domestic bourgeois family) as enabled through the agency of sublime encounters. In chapter three, I examine Hodges's painting of the ruined monuments of Easter Island and its pendant of Tahiti in relation to Poussin's painting, Et in Arcadia Ego, each of which is pervaded by an elegiac mood constitutive of "civilized" subjectivity as, again, the displaced effect of a sublime encounter. In all these chapters, I show these transformations to be more equivocal than they at first appear. Indeed, the sublime, I argue, is this equivocation. To reveal it as such, as I aim to do here, is less to undermine the "civilized" subject as to restore it to the multiple cultural and historical indeterminacies at its origin.