Stuplime

One way of calling attention to the affinity between exhaustion and the astonishment particular to the sublime, invoking the latter while detaching it from its previous romantic affiliations, is to refer to the aesthetic experience I am talking about—one in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom as the stuplime.

To return to my encounters with Reznikoff’s work, I see a strong echo of the stuplime. What I experience isn’t boredom, but it’s certainly something like it. I am shocked and fatigued by the writing, and this drives me into a space where as a reader, I simply shut down.

The stuplime always works in this way, playing on the viewer's patience, sneaking in arguments about larger systems through its strategic deployment of confusion and boredom.