Getting Emotional: Passionate Theories

Catalog description

This course examines connections between emotion, feeling, and affect in several key texts from 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century literatures. We will ask how and why affect becomes a central concept for writers and thinkers in the Enlightenment, and chart the ways in which affect productively opens up onto contemporary theorizations of identity, gender, sexuality, and race. Possible authors include: Wordsworth, Austen, Blake, Equiano, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wilde, Pater, Kant, Melville, Hofmansthal, Hume. Films by Todd Haynes, McQueen, Campion, Frampton. Theoretical readings by Berlant, Ellison, Terada, Deleuze, Stewart. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.