My Journey Through Awe

When I started this class, I had no idea what it was going to entail. Throughout the semester, I feel like I've gone on this journey that has helped me truly understand what awe is.
The first thing that I did that helped me understand what brings me awe, was the list of 10 books that bring me awe. You can find it here. From there, I had to move beyond what brings me awe, into how awe can function and work. So I chose to write a post about The Yellow Wallpaper. A short story that has caused me to feel many different things over the course of my scholarly life, it finally helped me understand one of the many different ways that awe can work.
From here, I'm not really sure what happened. But something inspired me to start thinking about the awe of dance, and how that functions in literature and digital media. So I started to baby my idea, and grow it in different ways. Then I did my picture story thing. And that really helped me clarify my ideas, and figure out what I really wanted to talk about for my final project.
A few days later we did the digital media awe list, and that was really cool for me, to be able to explore a slightly different idea but still find ways in which it related to dance as well. One of my favorite awe inspiring example of digital media that relates to dance is still Thought of You, which is at the end of my list.
After this, my journey becomes pretty focused on my paper and prototype. I developed my creative side of my research first, and as a result, I had my prototype up before I had even started my paper, but my prototype helped me refine my ideas further, so it all worked out. And then I started researching for my paper. My list of sources came first, followed by what I had so far (but still nowhere near finished). My final draft is something that I'm quite pleased with (although it still wasn't finished), and since then, my paper has gotten even better.
My journey through awe has been unique and interesting. I have learned more about dance than I already knew, and I think that is what surprised me more than anything. It's been a wonderful journey. And at the end of my journey, I came out with a paper that I'm proud of.

Frustrations with "Awe"

There are no pertinent pictures for abstract musings, so this
is Shangri La. You'll have to just pretend you're there if you
want the full effect, because as Walter Benjamin notes, the
age of mechanical [digital] reproduction is not the best at
reproducing aura/awe.

I've had a tough time wrapping my head around the idea of awe this semester, because I feel like it can be so subjective (and as I'll discuss later, I think moments of awe are most often isolated and individual). As I've read posts from people's wonder journals, I've thought to myself time and time again, "I'm not feeling it," and at times I get the sense that sharing my moments of awe through social media is really just cheapening my true moments of wonder and making me search for them in places where they aren't. I grew even more frustrated when I read Burke's treatise on the sublime, because though I followed his argument and found myself agreeing with pretty much everything  he was saying, I still didn't really feel like it encapsulated my idea of awe or wonder at all. It's then that I began to wonder if maybe awe and the sublime are not so synonymous as we like to make them and, aside from that, if awe is truly communicable. The conclusion that I've come to is that while awe and the sublime are certainly related, they nonetheless represent separate experiences which are transferable but not to the same effect or potency as the original experience.

So, as to the question of whether the sublime and awe are the same thing, I thought about what each is composed of. I originally did a ton of searches for the physiology of awe/wonder/the sublime but turned up little that was of value. Apparently, scientists care little about things like the sublime, and those involved in humanities research have a poor working definition of physiology, because the only things I could find were interpretive, personal findings rather than the brain scans and endorphin maps that I was hoping for. So, as personal, opinionated interpretations are all that is to be had, I figured I would offer my own.