Search results
This article addresses two questions about artworks. First, why do we emotionally respond to characters and stories that we believe are fictional? Second, why are some media better than others at generating specific types of emotions? I answer these questions using psychological research that suggests our minds are not unified, but are comprised of numerous subsystems that respond differently to various aspects of artworks. I then propose a framework to help us understand how films, videogames, and literature interact with our minds in different ways, which explains why they tend to excel at generating different types of emotions.
2 Mutinous emotion The emotions of mutineers contributed to their subjectivity ‘from the inside out’, being their inner responses to the world around them, forming a circuit with their sensory experience and shaping the way that they interacted with their environment.1 The passage of time and the selection of words mediated the raw emotion of the mutiny, rendering historical analysis a fragile business. The difficulties of reading emotions from their retrospective literary expression notwithstanding, certain emotions emerge during the process of revolt with
, electronic and social media) whipped up popular sentiment to demand complete solidarity. As emotional politics took over traditional spaces for debate and discussion, the urge to explain the current phase of Indian politics and the electoral victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) through the lens of emotions appears to be irresistible. However, all such accounts that invoke a simple and rather indefensible binary between emotions and reason remain myopic. They fail to recognise the deeper shifts that are occurring in the political discourse – changes that often lie
This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. The Renaissance of Emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which early modern texts explore emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine.
The chapters in the book seek to demonstrate how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in the early modern period. The Renaissance of Emotion will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, the history of emotion, theatre and cultural history, and the history of ideas.
been conceived as a triumph of reason and rationality over emotions. To the extent it relies on emotions, it carefully directs them through curated narratives deployed in the realisation of predetermined advocacy objectives ( Fernandes, 2017 : 2). With humanitarian actors increasingly engaging in specific thematic issues and policy changes, they have privileged authoritative facts that positions them as experts, enhancing their legitimacy in the eyes of decision
things are . It enables us to ask ‘why?’ and ‘for how long?’ It permits us to posit other ways for things to be. Enter the history of emotions and a curious challenge. In general, and with some notable exceptions, historians have steered clear of historicising the human being itself. 1 Humans have been actors in shifting historical scenery, and it has sufficed to analyse that scenery and the drama within it. This has been at odds with the aforementioned tendency to reject what is . If historians have tended to reject transhistorical universals, they
From the late twentieth century, historians have combined theoretical perspectives to tackle new topics or to revisit the old. One such amalgamation occurred in the history of emotions, in which historians have integrated ideas derived from psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and cultural studies. The Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga (writing in 1919), the sociologist Norbert Elias (1939) and the Annaliste Lucien Febvre (1941) are frequently discussed as founders of emotions history. While Febvre made a general plea for the historical
Representations trigger emotions that drive the struggle for recognition and respect. How an entity is represented, or wishes to be represented, influences its actions. Desire to cultivate a certain image of the Self, to be recognised in a particular way, is driven by a feeling of disrespect that manifests as a social hurt. Such hurt fosters a preoccupation with seeking a particular form of recognition through foreign policy actions. 1 If we allow such a reading of Iran's actions to present itself alongside conventional accounts of Iranian
The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga is a perfect vehicle for tracing the history of the emotions, in that it offers an unparalleled darkening of mood over time. This saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The conceit of the work, as laid out in its prose prologue, is that
5 Connecting reason and emotion W riting, like reading, was an activity that held a magnetic draw for some women of this period. Writing could be a strong impulse, a necessity that kept the mind free, the thoughts flowing and the writer psychologically stable. Eighteenth-century correspondents commonly spent many lines of ink on the very subject of how writing letters to their friends acted as an emotional salve. As Femke Molekamp has argued, ‘the lived approach to emotional life as expressed, and indeed negotiated, within a given relationship in correspondence