Bowring, Jacqueline2020-02-182014-05-152014-05-15https://hdl.handle.net/10182/11422The most benign of anglophile cities, Christchurch, New Zealand, suddenly became possessed by something monstrous as a series of earthquakes beginning in 2010 shook the city to pieces. Some 3 years, 185 deaths, and over 13,000 aftershocks later, only 20% of the central city remains, and there are vast voids, houses crushed by rocks, and others teetering on the edges of cliffs. Wracked by a geological version of Tourette’s syndrome, the landscape behaves unpredictably, shaking and shouting profanities. The simultaneous fascination and horror with the events and their impact exceeds comprehension; the Sublime has come to Christchurch. Another city, another time: Lisbon, 1755, and a massive earthquake of over magnitude 8.5 sets off a tsunami, and the city is on fire. This calamitous event shocked Europe and brought vivid focus to the aesthetic of the Sublime. Already an emerging concept, the Sublime was amplified and moulded by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, providing a frame for the terror and strange beauty of the earthquake’s power and devastation. Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke leveraged off the Lisbon earthquake to shape their theoretical positions on the Sublime, including Kant’s term Erschütterung, which describes the agitation of the mind from the Sublime - a word which can be translated as “a shuddering vibration, disruption, blow, shock , trauma.” All of this resonates with the experience of Christchurch’s earthquakes, and this paper tracks this legacy of seismic Sublimity from its origins in Lisbon’s catastrophe to a contemporary disaster. Connections are also made to other recent seismic events including Valdivia (Chile) and Japan’s earthquake and tsunami of 2011. As one Christchurch resident observed in a newspaper report, in an unwitting evocation of the Sublime, “in a way it’s quite magnificent looking at those cliffs. It is quite a magnificent sight what Mother Nature did to us.”8 pagesenearthquakesConference Contribution - unpublished