SOURCE: “At the Crossroads of the Nineteenth Century: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Sublime,” in America's Modernisms: Revaluing the Canon, edited by Kathryne V. Lindberg and Joseph G. Kronick, Louisiana State University Press, 1996, pp. 77-100.

In the following essay, Sussman interprets the sublime and ironic qualities of “Benito Cereno.”

Still swept up in the whirlwind that emanates in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century readers share the predicament of Benjamin's Angelus Novus,¹ even on the threshold of a millennial hyperspace in which the spatial barriers once separating social and cultural anomalies have been obliterated. The wind blowing in from the nineteenth century is a powerful one, not only in the land- and seascapes that Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Melville described and that Friedrich, Blake, Courbet, and Turner painted, but in the pull, the constructive and destructive force, that its intellectual systems continue to exert. We turn to the void of a...