등산과 풍경 - 워즈워스의 숭고

Abstract

This paper aims to explain how mountaineering and exposure to mountain landscapes contribute to consolidating Wordsworth’s aesthetic vision of the sublime. Mountaineering is conditioned by material and historical developments, as is aesthetics. Native to the Lake District surrounded with the rugged mountains, Wordsworth naturally interacts with the sights and the sounds of mountains, cultivating the sublime sense of unity which works beyond and in excess of contrarieties and divisions. For Wordsworth, the sublime is not an aesthetic category of appreciating natural landscapes so much as a poetic and political principle that occupies central position in his literary oeuvre. Wordsworth emphasizes the power of the spectator’s mind, rather than the external objects, in creating the sublime. He shows that landscape and its viewer, nature and mind, individual and nation must be woven together, modifying each other, to set in motion the sublime effects. In his compositions of crossing Simplon Pass and climbing Snowdon, for example, Wordsworth masterfully juxtaposes individual objects to demonstrate how they, without losing their individualities, cohere into a unity, creating a sense of “interchangeable supremacy” in the transformative act of the mind.