Emotions and Literature: Histories, Cultures, and Societies

Catalog description

What is the role of the emotions in our lives? How have people across cultures represented and expressed their feelings? Why and how do films, TV shows, and works of literature make us - spectators and readers - experience emotions? Exploring these questions, this course introduces undergraduate students to the history of emotions as a field of critical inquiry. The main objective of the course is to provide a series of interpretative tools and creative skills for comparative critique through cross-cultural and transhistorical lenses. To achieve this goal, we will study emotions as both themes and processes central to cultural production. Primary materials will range across geographical areas, historical periods, artistic movements, and genres, including literature, music, and cinema. Literary texts will encompass poetry, prose, and drama. We will examine cultural responses to emotionality, sensibility, and affectivity from classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism, and present-day popular culture and entertainment. Because we will study the development of human sensations, this course is about our own experiences as well as about analyzing different kinds of experiences. We will see how what we read, hear, and watch has been shaped by emotions, and how these cultural products can, in turn, shape who we are and how we relate to one another.