Content

Attention, emotion! This year’s course explores critical theories that focus on the role of feelings and affects in modern and contemporary Western culture. Key questions we will address include: Why do people feel what they feel? What function(s) do affects perform in culture and society? And what role(s) do literature and the arts play as media shaping, promoting and critiquing emotions?

According to most critical theorists we will discuss, the feelings and affective states people experience (such as fear, indignation, happiness or excitement) are neither a purely natural, universal given, nor mere social or cultural conventions. Social groups across different periods and cultures can indeed be shown to experience similar emotions, yet this does not mean that emotions are always culturally coded in a similar fashion. The names social groups give to emotions, the causes they relate them to, the feelings they value and endow with significance, the ways in which they gender and racialize emotions, and the extent to which they (consciously) allow affects to determine their everyday lives indeed differ widely. As a layer in cultural communication located between what social groups think (thought) and do (practice), feelings thus perform a key role in forging and maintaining, but possibly also altering, cultures.

It is widely established that since the 18^th century, with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West, now canonized art and literature began to play a major role in the history of emotions. In its attempt to upend the ruling aristocracy’s impersonal system of traditional kinship, the bourgeoisie came to place the cultivation of personal feelings towards others high on the agenda. Thus, it was during the “Age of Reason” that personal passions and emotions as well came to prominence in the West—and while, oversimplifying, it was left to the philosophers to challenge individuals to think for themselves, it was to literature and the arts that the bourgeoisie turned to pattern and install a new emotional sensibility for modern subjectivity. In the later course of canonized Western literary and art history, the key role of affect was often downplayed again or deliberately opposed—think of the 19^th century call to objective (emotionless) observation in Realism, or the 20^th century modernist demand of impersonal, objective form, etc. Yet in Western culture more broadly (and in less canonized creative practice), the conscription of affect continued to play a vital role. Not only did modern bourgeois culture, for example, come to exclude or alienate large (class, gender and racial) groups from its new affective economy. Capitalism, the new (and now global) economic system installed by the bourgeoisie, also came to commodify affects: at the expense of reason and informed practice, media culture and politics increasingly became governed by (negative) emotions that sell. Foregrounding theorists who since the 18^th century have critically approached the function(s) of affect in Western society, this course aims to highlight the continued significance of literature and the arts in elucidating what we feel, how we feel, and why we feel it.

Course material

Reader with theoretical texts.

Format: more information

An introductory series of lectures, followed by group presentations and discussions.