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Tracing poetic interpretations of sublimity’s relation to wonder, this project considers how several British poets flourishing between the 1660s and the 1840s leverage poetic form and content to critique received knowledge about learning, friendship, and the divine. They recognize that the relationship among these three elements is in flux, and thus their consideration of and attempts to encounter sublimity, and thereby access wonder and the un-reasonable, reveal possibilities that social teachings and practices could not and did not recognize as viable options. The simple fact of acknowledging the unknown as well as what is considered impossible makes them, and thus their readers, more sensitive to new ways of thinking about existing problems and thereby creates space for alternative ways of thinking, connecting with other human beings, and relating to the divine.

This thesis examines trans women's contemporary writing in relation to a theory of the excessive object, sublimity, transmisogyny and minor literature. In doing so, this text is influenced by Susan Stryker's work on monstrosity, abjection and transgender rage in the article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994). The excessive object refers to a concept coined in this thesis to describe sublimity from another perspective than that of the tradition following from Immanuel Kant's A Critique of Judgment, building on feminist scholarship on the aesthetic of the sublime. Of particular relevance are critiques of the patriarchal dynamics of sublimity and the idea of the feminine sublime as it is explored with reference to literature by Barbara Freeman in The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (1995). Following from the feminist critique of sublimity, trans women's writing is explored as minor literature through a re-reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on Franz Kafka in Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (1986), with attention to the importance that conditions of impossibility, marginality and unintelligibility holds for the political possibilities of minor literature. These readings form the basis for an analysis of four literary texts by two contemporary authors, Elena Rose, also known as little light, and Sybil Lamb, in addition to a deeper re-engagement with Stryker's work. In so doing, this thesis also touches on topics of power, erasure, trauma, self-sacrifice, appropriation and unrepresentability.

<p>Oda kao umjetnička forma, lijepo i uzvi&scaron;eno, razum i ma&scaron;ta, dinamički i<br />matematički uzvi&scaron;eno, uzvi&scaron;enost forme i uzvi&scaron;enost ideje, subjektivizacija uzvi&scaron;enosti, neki<br />su od ključnih pojmova kojima se bavi ovo istraživanje. Međutim, u &scaron;irem kontekstu, ono<br />obuhvata i pojmove individualnog i op&scaron;teg, vječnog i prolaznog, konačnog i beskonačnog,<br />ljudskog i mitskog, ljudskog i božanskog, čovjeka i prirode. Sva ta pitanja, naime, prožimaju<br />se u uzvi&scaron;enim okvirima ode, koja je svojim postojanjem obilježavala najsvjetlije tačke<br />pojedinih epoha i upisivala ih u veličanstvenu hroniku ljudske istorije. Ovaj rad predstavlja<br />osvrt na tu zlatnu hroniku u kojoj će, nadamo se, i na&scaron;a epoha upisati nekoliko stihova.</p> / <p>Ode as an artistic form, beautiful and sublime, reason and imagination,<br />dynamically and mathematically sublime, the sublimity of a form and the sublimity of an<br />idea, subjectivity of the sublime, are some of the key terms of this study. However, in<br />somewhat wider context, it also includes the individual and the universal, eternal and<br />temporal, finite and infinite, human and mythical, human and divine, man and nauture. All<br />these questions are intertwined in the sublime frame of an ode, which, by its own existence,<br />has marked the brightest spots of each epoch and written them in the magnificent chronicle of<br />human history. This work represents the retrospect of that golden chronicle in which our own<br />epoch will hopefully write a few lines.</p>