EMOTION IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Course Objectives:

Study of feeling/emotion in modern and contemporary literary and cultural texts has always been a topic of theoretical and critical attention, with a growing number of conferences, fellowships, books, and journal articles devoted to it. This course examines human feelings/emotions as a theory for understanding the expression and formation of modern social identities and contemporary cultural and political formations. That the feelings/emotions do not only vary from culture to culture but also have histories within cultures is our guiding supposition. By watching films and reading novels, short stories, and essays by some prominent modern and contemporary fiction writers we will examine the relationship between the emotions and modern and current sociocultural formations. We will ask whether it makes sense to understand our contemporary world as a number of characteristic ways of feeling. Throughout the course, we will consider a way to interpret human feelings as a theory for critiquing culture, politics, and society. The course is interdisciplinary in aim: we will consider literary and philosophical texts as well a range of basic writings on feelings/emotion in history, sociology, cognitive sciences, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Students will have an opportunity to work on areas of their own choosing. Also, this should be noted that this is not a psychology course, it is mainly based on literary works and their interpretation with respect to some culturally specific emotions.

Course Content:

The course encompasses three thematic units: Structures of feelings, history of feelings (with a focus on the 20th and 21st centuries); Specific feelings, emotions; Affective spaces. The biggest part of the course will be dedicated to specific feelings/emotions (and their cultural/literary/aesthetic representations) that are thought to have contemporary cultural significance: pain (with a focus on its bodily part); nostalgia and melancholy; happiness/bliss; anger and resentment; desire/love; haptic/tactile etc. visual sentiments; boredom/depression/indifference; anxiety and fear; intimacy and distance; mass culture, mass feelings; the role of feelings within public life and the cultural formations that create affective public spheres; politics of affect; ordinary affects. Because the study of emotion is interdisciplinary, the range of issues we will explore could be varied and extensive at times. Don’t be scared or annoyed by this; be fearless and excited about it. Our primary purpose will always be to invent ways of analysing, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the connection between literature, culture and emotion. Thus, class sessions should be more like a lab than a recitation; class discussions should be opportunities to try out new ideas, figure things out, and examine unexplored areas of feeling, thinking, and learning.