Delagrange’s Vehicle to the Sublime

When viewing a piece of art or reading a selection of text, one typically does not have the piece’s creator standing over their shoulder explaining to them what they should get out of the work. Instead, the viewer interprets the piece in their own mind, building off of previous knowledge and understanding to develop meaning in the piece. In this way, the consumer of the piece is actually the author in a sense according to AnisBawarshi. The Author who originally penned or created the piece is still forever tied to it as the creator and is due that credit, but as time goes on, that connection loses its meaning and they are demoted to merely part of the literary text.

Susan Delagrange's project, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement," takes the notion that the end reader has authorial power and agency a step further in presenting her information through a format that allows thereader to tell themselves her story in their own way. Delagrangedoes this by using a hybrid of mediums to present all her ideas and allowing the reader to navigate through them in any order they choose. This way, readers can dive deeper into concepts and ideas they find intriguing or of significance right away without getting hung up on lesser ideas distracting them from what they really care about.

By distilling the ideas the individual reader finds important, Delagrange brings her piece closer to what Longinus would describe as the “sublime”. Longinus claims that “every topic naturally includes certain elements which are inherent in its raw material. It follows that sublimity will be achieved if we consistently select the most important of these inherent features and learn to organize them as a unity by combining one with another. The first of these procedures attracts the reader by the selection of details, the second by the density of those selected” (Longinus 353). The process in which Longinus details in order to achieve the sublime is accurate, but it neglects the truth that what one reader finds important might be completely different from another reader, leaving the possibility of multiple versions of the sublime form. Delagrange’s hybrid text creates a vehicle for every reader to reach their own version of the sublime.