Have you ever gone to a concert and watched a performance that gave you goosebumps? The crescendo of a song, the moment the singer screams before jumping off the stage. Have you read a book and realized you were crying? What about the vertiginous experience of contemplating the bottom of the Marina Trench or the center of a black hole? These two phenomena can be explained in the aesthetic concepts of duende and the sublime. In this class, we will discuss and write about how it makes us feel to watch Marina Abramović and Alex Honnold flirt with death and learn why Kendrick Lamar sells out stadiums. With a firm grasp of duende and the sublime’s transcendental qualities, we will explore aesthetic concepts in literature ranging from canonical luminaries like Whitman, Yeats, Toomer, and Didion to the contemporary genius of works like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, or Justin Torres’s We the Animals. A compilation of essays, poems, and short novels, both haunting and strange, whose words will leave you amazed and unraveled, will also change the way you think about yourself and the world.