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This chapter examines how Henry Fielding makes surprise eminently visible in his novels. It shows that Fielding's fiction incorporates the gendered forms of surprise exemplified by both Robinson Crusoe and Pamela: picaresque violence and eroticized shock. It argues that surprise in Fielding's fiction became almost synonymous with what Joseph Addison called the pleasures of the imagination. It also contends that surprise is an essential element in Fielding's rationale for comic ridicule; that his ethical defense of ridicule is bound up with an aesthetic justification for surprise; that he is interested not only in the narrative mechanism of surprise but also its rhetoric; and that in representing moments of astonishment, Fielding nostalgically harks back to the instantaneity of theatrical spectacle, even as he develops techniques that anticipate the narrative innovations of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy and gothic romance. Finally, the chapter explores how the two basic forms of surprise—the physical and the cognitive—are interrelated and inflected by differences of class and gender.

This chapter examines William Wordsworth's anecdotes of sudden moods, encounters, and realizations within the eighteenth-century context of surprise. It first considers the idea of epiphany in relation to the Wordsworthian structure of experience before analyzing Wordsworth's poetry through reference to the affective vocabulary of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the discourse of aesthetics and philosophy, the novel, and latter-day emotion theory. It then discusses the explanatory possibilities of the word “surprise” as used by Wordsworth, and specifically how it figures in some of his most striking phrases of astonishment. Finally, it explores two hallmarks of Wordsworth's poetic originality: the anecdote of ordinary experience and the representation of subjective states of feeling, or what Wordsworth called “moods of my own mind.”

This chapter examines occult practices in terms of the metaphysical pleasures they provide by focusing on the domain of leisure and play. It first considers metaphysical pleasure arising from wonder and astonishment, with particular emphasis on how these emotions, typically known through the concepts of ʻajab and taʻajjub, have been understood in the premodern Islamic tradition. It then discusses the pleasures of contemporary aesthetic and literary consumption and how these pleasures are enabled by a trend toward subordinating the metaphysical to a set of secular sensibilities governing the appreciation of cinema, graphic arts, literature, and fashion. It shows that that each of these metaphysical pleasures provides rationalized pathways for approaching the metaphysical that do not require one to answer questions of truth or falsity.

This chapter traces the emergence of classical Hollywood cinema from the earlier practices often called the cinema of attractions. The chapter argues that the cinema of attractions attracted viewers due to the astonishment of seeing lifelike movement. Although classical cinema continues to tap into this special affection, it also develops modes that enable the feeling of the fantastic – seeing things with human eyes that only seem to exist in the imagination. Classical cinema thus develops a mode that relies upon the transposability and translocatability of the medium to structure a relation with the viewer. The movement-image (Deleuze) is the name for the interface developed for this mode.

This chapter explores a different experience of afterness: the mode of thinking that differentiates between subtle and crude analysis. During the time of afterness, when so much has come and gone, has been assumed and left behind, at a time when so little still seems capable of really surprising us, it is perhaps not superfluous to recall that at the origin of all philosophy, all love of wisdom, lies the moment of thaumazein, the feeling of astonishment and wonder that gives rise to questioning and reflection. Taking its cue from Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “crude thinking” (plumpes Denken) and Walter Benjamin’s theoretical commentary on it, the chapter considers the afterness of a specific modality of thinking as a test case for modernity’s political investments. What plumpes Denken ultimately would require of us in the uncontainable Greek event of thaumazein and its afterness would also be to remain faithful to its opposite, subtlety and refined thinking, without simply betraying crude thinking.

This chapter examines the philosophical concept of wonder. Wonder has two senses. For one, it can suggest marvel or awe, the kind one might experience in astonishment or worship. But for another, it can mean puzzlement or logical perplexity. From a philosophical viewpoint, it is tempting to conclude that the second meaning is what Plato and Socrates have in mind: philosophy as a process of reason, through which the mysterious is brought down to earth. This is definitely how most philosophers have understood Socrates’s wonder—especially when it is read through Aristotle, who more explicitly argues that wonder catalyzes understanding. Another well-known appearance of wonder comes from Francis Bacon, who says that wonder is both “the seed of knowledge” and also “broken knowledge.”

Proust is famous for attributing monumental powers to art and aesthetic attention. Yet, as this chapter shows, In Search of Lost Time sometimes calls the reader’s attention to objects so unexceptional that they thwart the logic of masterful appropriation. This chapter explores the alliance between aesthetic pleasure and babbling or inarticulate speech acts. In Combray the narrator utters his first aesthetic judgment—a joyful “zut, zut, zut, zut”—when he stumbles upon a wondrous and banal assemblage of objects: a chicken strutting on a roof and a pinkish glimmer of light on a pond. Rather than standing above to judge, the perceiver is drawn into the ordinary scene. Tracing echoes of that initial exclamation throughout the novel, the chapter argues that at such moments of ineloquent astonishment, the Proustian beholder enjoys the world in its commonplace singularity, rather than as a mineable source of private wealth.

This chapter shows that Isaac derives his conceptual framework for the concept of ecstasy, along with the technical terms wonder and astonishment, from sources that were originally written in Syriac. In particular, both Ephrem and John the Solitary situate wonder and astonishment within the framework of the future world, which means that Isaac’s desire to frame wonder and astonishment in terms of the mind’s ability to wander into heaven and acquire knowledge of the future world demonstrates his dependence on a trajectory of thought that arises from these two authors. Isaac, however, offers the distinct contribution of describing this connection between wonder and knowledge of the future world with the language of itinerancy. According to Isaac, perfect Christians obtain heavenly knowledge during the moment of prayer, when their minds become itinerant and wander into heaven in order to receive a pledge of the heavenly mysteries from the Holy Spirit.

This chapter shows that Isaac derives specific definitions for the ecstatic experience of wonder and astonishment from Syriac translations of two sources that were originally written in Greek: Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and a series of Evagrian texts. The first section of this chapter concludes that Isaac uses language from the first chapter of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology in order to establish a connection between language of light and darkness and the theme of the Shekinah, on the one hand, and wonder and astonishment on the other. The second section shows that Isaac explicitly equates either wonder or astonishment with two Evagrian technical terms—“solitary knowledge” and “purity of mind”—and two Evagrian concepts—the joy that occurs during prayer and angelic visitation.

This chapter examines Isaac’s synthetic account of wonder and astonishment, which makes use of all the source material discussed in the previous three chapters. According to Isaac, the human soul is capable of processing material sensations with temporal reasoning, but it cannot process spiritual forms of knowledge. Since spiritual insights are immaterial and cannot be understood through temporal reasoning, the soul enters into a state of uncomprehending astonishment when it receives spiritual insights from divine revelation. The mind, by contrast, is capable of comprehending spiritual insights through wonder. The transition from astonishment to wonder represents the moment when a person moves from soul to mind and begins to comprehend the mysteries of the future world through ecstasy. Once people understand the mysteries of the future world, they begin to live the heavenly way of life while remaining in the material world.

The conception and development of wonder and astonishment is one of Isaac’s most influential contributions to Syriac theology. The conclusion briefly points to areas where further study will reveal the depth of influence that Isaac’s use of the terms wonder and astonishment have had on later Syriac authors. In particular, the conclusion examines areas where Isaac’s conception of wonder and astonishment influenced two eighth-century East-Syriac authors who had recourse to his texts: John Dalyatha and Joseph Hazzaya. First, this chapter points out that John and Joseph follow Isaac in connecting wonder with the cessation of impulses. In addition, John Dalyatha manifests a linguistic dependence on Isaac with his use of the constellation of the terms astonishment, wonder, silence, and limit, while Joseph Hazzaya depends on Isaac in connecting wonder with both study and tears.

The final chapter considers various aspects of Ian’s condition and his views on some of the scientific and artistic activities with which he has been involved. He explains how he is more consciously embodied than disembodied, why he agreed to lose his anonymity to become involved in a biography, and how, though he appreciates science designed to confirm or refute a hypothesis, he prefers the on-the-fly informed curiosity behind other experiments. He talks of his awareness of the need to be available in a lab and yet keep a distance to perform experiments to his best ability. Ian reflects on meeting Peter Brook and his involvement in Valley of Astonishment 20 years after L’Homme Qui. Ian’s continuing vulnerability is revealed in a short narrative about what happened when the lights went out one night, while he considers the effects of aging when meeting a similarly affected subject.