Beyond the limits: Longinus'On the sublime

Abstract

Despite its place in the history of Rhetoric, the treatise On the Sublime seems to move away from a school of rhetoric as an art of persuasion based on learningoriented rules and precepts. Although Longinus is part of the rhetorical tradition of his time, in his view, which has nothing to do with stylistics, the sublime is not definable through the formal language of rhetoric because it goes beyond the limits of that art. The treatise presents what we may call an aesthetics of the unlimited and the impossible, evident in the examples of sublime moments in literary texts given by the author.