Keeping a Wonder Journal

I am asking my students to keep a "wonder journal." This is to be a place to record and reflect upon experiences of wonder, and a means to consciously cultivate their sense of awe. Ultimately this will be a source of ideas for their academic projects, but before the wonder journal takes on that prosaic role, it needs to play a more subjective one.

If my students keep a wonder journal, they will experience wonders.

What kind of logic is that? This is completely artificial, I will admit. To keep a wonder journal does not give orders to the universe to arrange marvels. One might as well plan spontaneity! So, what's the point?

The point is that by making a routine of expectation, by keeping the door open for things sublime, that that faith will be rewarded. If you look for wonders, you tend to find them.

Travelers know this. They go to places -- whether that's the Great Wall of China or the Corn Palace of South Dakota -- expecting to be amazed, hoping to encounter things that will change the way they view the world. So use your wonder journal to be a traveler, whether or not there is actual travel involved.

Specific suggested entries:

• Report an Experience
  Report specific, personal experiences with wonder, the sublime, or awe. Some could be from the past, and some should be from the present.
• Identify awe-inspiring works of literature or art
  Focus on specific works that have proven powerfully meaningful to you in terms of creating moments of awe or wonder.
• Explore one of the Terms of Awe
  Seek examples from one's own life, or as recorded in literature or other media. Choose something with which you've had a personal connection. 
• Go on a Field Trip
  Go someplace where you are likely to experience the sublime. Tell the story in your wonder journal 
• Make a Gratitude List
  This can be a bit of a cliche, but the act of listing a great number of things for which you are grateful can take you to a place of spiritual awe.
• Draw a Picture
  Whether or not you're an artist, try to give some kind of visual rendering of something awe-inspiring. You might accompany this with an explanation.

Specific instructions for the assignment are posted here.

The Terms of Awe

I've designed this course in order for us to come to terms with awe, to know it for what it is, where it is potent and active in life, in nature, and in life.

Sometimes, in order to come to terms, you need terms -- a vocabulary to scaffold experience and wireframe understanding. So here is a first stab at exploring awe as a set of terms. These are words that name movements and feelings and a great many things. They will be the first handles we grab onto as we language our way toward awe. So, to begin with, a triad of terms: awe, wonder, and the sublime...

Welcome to the Literature of Awe

This blog is devoted to investigating the concept of awe and the ways that awe, wonder, and associated concepts are elicited by, documented in, and investigated through literature and other media. While associated with a specific senior course offered at Brigham Young University from January - April, 2014, this blog is nevertheless intended as a general and permanent resource for any interested in investigating these same topics.

Course Description:

ENGL 495: The Literature of Awe (Gideon Burton)In this senior course, we will trace the literary theme of awe across multiple periods and genres of literature. Reverence for something greater than ourselves as well as fear of the unknown and inscrutable are complementary concepts that permeate our entire literary tradition and which pose profound questions regarding the psychology of experience and how time, distance, complexity, and alterity are mediated to us aesthetically. We will study the liminal nature of wonder: poised at the threshold of oceans, or eons, or the puzzling unconscious, there is something compelling and breathtaking about being on the frontier or at the edges of what can be known or expressed. Like Petrarch atop Mount Ventoux, we will scan horizons in order to examine the workings of wonder.

We will study the rhetoric of awe (tropes and conventions that invoke wonder) and the aesthetics of awe (styles and genres sympathetic to this theme). Representative genres include epic, metaphysical, and devotional poetry, utopian literature, travel narratives, occult literature, gothic fiction, science fiction, and the literature of the frontier. We will also touch on cultural practices and media for constructing and experiencing awe: architecture, museums, spectacles, and the rise of film and technological wonders.

A Challenge
As with concepts of the sacred, the power of awe may correlate with its subjectivity: one person's source of awe may seem sentimental or even blasphemous to another. Moreover, awe can be counterfeited or cheapened-- even in the very act of describing it or attempting its preservation. As Wordsworth said, "we murder to dissect," meaning that as we turn to analyze, to anatomize something so subjective and evocative, we deflate and deflower. It almost seems that you cannot have and know awe; you can experience it, or you can analyze it, but the one precludes the other.

I challenge my students and readers to push past these dangers and to be open to awe as a transformative and perhaps transcendent mode of experience. I challenge you to withstand the cynicism that is all too possible and to stay open to awe and wonder in a childlike way. I further challenge myself and my readers to be open to the risks required of submitting to the awesome. Since awe can border on the terrors of unknown things, that is asking quite a bit. But I think it will be worth it.

Your Experiences of Awe
What about you? What have been sources of awe and wonder in your life? Can you attribute such experiences to works of art, literature, or media? Have the moments of wonder been inherent in such works, or in the particular way that you experienced them? Is awe a rare experience for you, a familiar place? Can you separate awe from religious experience or from artistic experience? Is modern-day awe so linked to technology, spectacle, and entertainment that you have not had experiences of wonder separate from those influences? What have been moments of awe in your life? Did you record these or return to these in any way? Have you been able to rekindle wonder or cultivate awe? Or are these concepts a part of your life?