The Rhetorics and Narratologies of the Sublime in Contemporary American Memoir: Mountains, Alaska, and the Farm

Traditional theories of the sublime center on a fraught and unsettling experience of overpowering natural phenomena. Such an approach seems difficult to reconcile with theories of the Anthropocene, which generally tend to question the nature/culture divide. From Longinus to Addison, natural landscapes were deemed sublime because of their overwhelming size and ethereality, which were commonly associated with the divine or sacred. Burke later theorized the sublime as provoking feelings of “awe” and “horror” while Kant claimed that mountains symbolized the “infinite”, “inaccessible” and “unknowable”. Contemporary avatars like the “stuplime” (Ngai 2005) and “haptic sublime” (McNee 2016) have more recently repositioned the sublime into an embodied and more participative relationship with non-human otherness. The memoir is a privileged genre to explore reappropriations of the sublime and related affects: the genre deploys a range of imaginative, rhetorical and narratological techniques in an inevitably human-centered approach, which allows it to dramatize the senses of excess, overwhelm, and disorientation (Purdy 2015, 421) as components of human life whereas they typically characterize the classical sublime’s transcendent realms and the Anthropocene. This paper examines three sublime sites as they figure in three memoirs: mountains in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (1997), Alaska in Ernestine Hayes’s Blonde Indian (2006), and the farm in Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life (2010). In different but related ways, these memoirs help us to assess the affordances and limits of using recent notions of the sublime to represent so-called “wilderness” landscapes as well as Anthropocene entanglements.