Pluralizing the Sublime in the Post-Romantic American Memoir: From the Visual to the Haptic

The Romantic sublime, which has influentially shaped the Western relationship with nature, is no longer viable in the Anthropocene because it views nature as separated from humans and does not fully represent the intricacy of human/non-human relationship (Caracciolo 2021). This paper assesses the limits and affordances of the notion of the “haptic sublime” (McNee 2016) for challenging the Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and ocularcentrism of the Romantic sublime in a way that would also lead to heightened self- and/or environmental awareness. To that end, it analyzes extracts from American ecobiographical memoirs that build on American Romanticism’s, and more specifically Henry D. Thoreau’s multisensorial approach to nature (Lombard 2019), which suitably integrates the subjective and embodied dimensions of the haptic sublime. Inspired by insights from affective ecocriticism and rhetorical (eco)narratology, these analyses show that the haptic sublime involves bodily and multisensorial contact with material environments which induce affects such as guilt, satisfaction, and joy, that move beyond the confines of the romantic experiences of awe and horror. Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Silvia Vásquez-Lavado's In the Shadow of the Mountain are considered so as to argue that recent mutations in the rhetoric of the sublime retrospectively unearths haptic dimensions to the experience of the sublime.