The Rhetoricity of the Analogical Figures in Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry

• 발행기관: 한국비평이론학회
• 저자명: Samchool Lee
• 간행물 정보: 『비평과 이론』제14권 2호, 265~285쪽, 전체 21쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2009.12.30

영문 초록

Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful has been regarded as the most representative aesthetic effort in the eighteenth-century British philosophy and has been known to influence Kan's asthetics a great deal. According to Burke, the word 'philosophical' in the title means 'scienctific.'This indicates that Burke regards aesthetics as an object of objective and universal knowledge. However, it has been noted that the eighteenth-century British aesthetic discourses, including Burke's, cannot transcend the political and economic conditions of the period. In this sense, Terry Eagleton sounds relevant when he asserts that Burke's Philosophical Enquiry epitomizes the eighteenth-century British bourgeois world-view that gets embodied in a new area called aesthetics when the bourgeoisie needed to consolidate their world-view. This paper, however, does not aim to point out ideological aspects of Burkean aesthetics by analyzing Burke's statements embodying the bourgeois word-view of the eighteenth-century England. The main objective of this paper is to indirectly support Eagleton's view of the book by analyzing the main themes of the Burkean aesthetics based on Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful by showing how burke's effort to distinguish the two elements deconstructs the boundary between the two and thus makes it possible for us to see how Burke's own effort to present aesthetics as universal in philosophical Enquiry is subverted by the rhetoricity in the book.

키워드

Edmund Burke Aesthetics The Sublime and the beautiful Eighteenth-century British Liberalism Rhetoric