I struggled with this piece a little, maybe it's the late hour, maybe it was the language, either way as I came to the close, I was struck with the notion that, in order to have a sense of sublime (in writing as opposed to art) there needs to be detail. The imagination is what fills in the gaps between descriptions to make a scene expressly the interpreters own. I feel that this process is what helps strike a reader as sublime. The detail is the focus and the imagination fills in the fuzzy background details.
I wish I could find the spot where it talked about how detail made the foreground become the background, but it seems to be escaping me at the moment. But to me, it seems that the details in effect can become something sublime on their own. Within the closer inspection an even smaller detail could bring a renewed sense and so on. I don't think the devil is in the details.
You have hit on Schor's point exactly: she argues that even though 18th century critics of art and literature opposed details to the sublime in their criticism, they are not able to maintain that boundary in practice. As Schor says in the final paragraph, detail was the very basis of the sublime--things become sublime by contrast to the mundane, everyday, the details of lived experience (as the Rubens painting suggests).
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