ИСТИНА

The paper examines the aesthetical and philosophical continuity between two influential writings of Carlyle's early period, “Sartor Resartus” (1836) and the lectures “On Heroes”(1841). Both works are inspired by a common set of values based on a disjunction between the coarse materiality of appearances and the mystical reality of the “Inner Facts of Things”. However the literary interpretation is strikingly different, tending to ironic ambivalence in one case and to the assertion of the sublime ideal in the other. The paper focuses on images and rhetorical figures that reflect a complex interplay of seemingly antagonistic categories, the sublime and the ironic. While the one insists on the sweeping powers of transformative experience and the other is concerned with the ability to see shrewdly through any kind of pathos, both seek to enlarge the boundaries of individual consciousness at the same time verging on the brink of self-destruction. The same paradox underlies their controversial relations with language since both the ironic and the sublime types of rhetoric often point to the deficiency and/or excess of verbal expression. The suggested reading of Carlyle's texts is supported by Victorian and Romantic cultural contexts.