A Summary of “Study Day: Literary Emotional Methodologies”Held at the University of Melbourne, 11 October, 2013

Preparatory Readings:From William Reddy’s Navigation of FeelingFrom Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Middle AgesFrom Henri Bergson Creative Evolution

Opening Remarks by Aleksondra Hultquist [link]

A summary of the talks:

Peter Holbrook [link to Holbrook handout and ] introduced (or rather reminded us) of the concept of “movement” in the etymology of the word “emotion”.   He focused his foray into emotion and literary studies through a reading of Henri Bergson (the early twentieth-century French philosopher).  Emotion, Holbrook reminded us, is not a state but a process.  It is littered with ambiguity, instability, mobility, and ambivalence.  Emotions are not pure, but often mixed and dynamic.  We spoke of the ways in which literature might best represent (or attempt to represent) not “states” of being, but “actions” of being; that what literature can capture are the moment of flux and movement in the emotional state, as in when “compassion” becomes the potential site for “rage” at the very end of Virgil's Aeneid.  Literature explores these moments of emotional ambiguity and movement. It endeavours to represent the “inarticulacy” of emotion, and to point to the moment of change from one state to another, the moment of trying to work out mixed states.  In this sense, literature captures the “phenomenon of the unsayable.”

Rebecca McNamara’s presentation [link to McNamara present] of the use of Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities”, tweaked for literary studies, provoked some of the most exciting and articulate conversations of the day. In rethinking ways to apply the “emotional community” as a “textual community” McNamara offered the idea that perhaps genres are emotional communities. Are the textual communities of genre people who read and write the same texts? Can we consider ‘genres’ themselves as emotional communities, that is, characterised by certain emotional tenor(s), or occupying particular emotional rhetorical stances? How do genres change over time, and with them, their emotional tenor? Can emotional connections between texts be made when formal, rhetorical, or thematic connections are weak? Finally, through a reading of James Simpson’s 2013 article “Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual ‘Face’”, McNamara suggested that literary scholars make up an emotional community, mutually engaged in the cognitive and affective practice of recognitional reading. The shift from questions about “emotional communities” to “textual communities” might be a way to rearticulate the study of history of emotions and literature.

Stephanie Trigg’s presentation examined William Reddy’s concept of “emotives” in terms of her own literary work on the trope of the “speaking face” in literature

through time (we examined wonderful excerpts of the face “seeming to say” emotional truths in Tristan and Isolde, Persuasion, and The Great Gatsby (do let her know if you find further examples to investigate! sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au ). The concept of “emotive” (which we discovered is perhaps not as articulated as we’d like it to be) is not always effective in thinking about the representation of emotion in literature. Literary texts, for instances tend not to name emotion, but explore the effects of emotion. Descriptions of literary emotion are rarely taxonomic in the way that Reddy considers “emotives to be. Additionally, can figurative language and ambiguity and “the radical uncertainty” of literary texts actually be put into productive dialogue with Reddy’s emotives? Trigg offered Monique Scheer’s work as a an alternative (you can find her work on the Bibliography we have created and are building…send us texts you think should appear on it). Through Scheer’s work, Trigg articulated how literary and historical texts tend not to provide clear taxonomies of emotion, that emotives are not just descriptive or performative that they “do things to the world” and are aspirations—what hey are trying to say about emotion—literary attempts to say how we feel) and the that the function of emotion in literature self-exploratory, a rehearsal of emotion, perhaps rather than descriptive accounts of “true” or “pure” emotions.

Following these papers we had a discussion regarding the relationship between the text and the reader in literary depictions and explorations of emotions. What role does the reader play in the interpretation of emotion, for instance, and what is the responsibility of the reader to interpret motional exploration? We pondered the creation of particular textual/emotional communities in literature (such as the community of literary sensibility). We also considered the motivations for authorial depiction of emotion and the description of gesture in literature as a way to read emotions or form emotions rather than the particular descriptions of an emotional state in and of itself.

The second roundtable of the day explored the deployment of methodologies in literary studies and offered papers that do the work of emotion interpretation in literary texts.

Merridee Bailey argued for the use of linguistics to read the emotional dynamics of Thomas Dekker’s “non-dramatic text” Worke for Armourers in order to clarify the emotional dynamic of commercial London in the late medieval and early modern period. [link to Bailey bibliography] Building on her work as an historian of the period, Bailey painstakingly parsed the use of word construction to clarify emotional intention both in the preface to the work as well as in the interpretation of the work itself. Through this work Bailey argued for the way in which “speech acts” can illuminate the economic scruples of Dekker’s text. She traced the speech acts of his text to demonstrate the kinds of economic moralities espoused in literature of the period, to pinpoint a kind of speaker/reader intimacy that occurs when considering ideas such as sin, moral conduct, grace and equity, finally offering that the oral literature of the period is not attempting to be dispassionate.

Aleksondra Hultquist [Hultquist-passions link] offered up her use of close reading strategies in understand the vocabulary of “the Passions” in the work of eighteenth-century writer, Eliza Haywood. By choosing texts specifically and close reading the emotional dynamics in how the passions play out in fictional situations, Haywood developed a specific vocabulary of the emotions, what Hultquist calls “an ethics of the emotions”. For Haywood, passions are dynamic, they are in close association with reason (a decline in one for instance will promote the decline of the other, for instance), and that reason does not control or oust the passions, but rather other passions (stronger passions) will do that. Hultquist then offered groupings of thematic ideas that she gathered form secondary research: ways to understand literary passions through lenses such as the body, gender, identity, and knowledge.

Grace Moore used Australian poetry about the campfire in order to explore the emotional significance of the campfire within Australian culture. She explained the reconfiguration of the meaning of fire to European immigrants upon landing and living in the Australian camp or bush. The campfire, as a site of “portable domesticity” and connection to the landscape as well as Australian nationalism, provided a space of repose, reverie, and well being to early settlers. The campfire not only demonstrates the myth of man over nature (the empowerment of man over nature), and the danger as well as the comfort associated with fire, but also the negative aspects of the campfire—its materiality and its potential for disaster and catastrophe.

A summary of the “conclusions” of the day:

The Literary Emotions Bibliography [link]

That literature is particularly good at representing the aspect of emotions that are concerned with movement, change, ambiguity, multiplicity, process, complexity, instability, and creativity. That literary emotions rarely describe what a single emotion “looks” like or “feels” like, but rather is interested in the processes and results of feeling. That literature is interested in “becoming” rather than “being.”

That it is useful to think about literary emotion in terms of its communities: emotional, textual, imagined, etc., and that these communities might be utilized to explore notions of genre, reader, audience, and/or book materiality.

Linguistics can be effectively used to read and describe the nuances of emotional dynamics in texts.

A summary of further questions/explorations:

By the end of the day, participants expressed the desire to more clearly articulate the following issues of literary emotion methodologies:

To read both Monique Scheer and Benedict de Spinoza more thoroughly as sources to theorize and utilize methodologies for emotion and literary

studies. (Sophie Ratcliffe’s On Sympathy was also suggested as a shared reading.)

How “affect” and “emotion” are represented in literature and how, as theoretical categories, they might be used to read and analyze literature. Stephanie Trigg offered to us her soon-to-be-published article in Exemplaria on the difference between affect and emotion as a place to begin the conversation and build upon her ideas. [link to paper] This paper is a work in progress, so please contact Trigg before citing.

What are the differences between William Reddy’s ”emotional regimes”, Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” of readers; Barbara Rosenwein’s “emotional communities”, and Brian Stock’s “textual communities.” How might these techniques be used to analyze emotion in literature?

How do “imaginative” or “literary” texts are different from “historical” texts and what those differences might mean to for exploring literature through the lens of emotions.

What are the somatic qualities of punctuation in creating textual emotion? We considered the exclamation points, ellipses, brackets, and dashes as methods to articulate emotional moments in literature, to create emotion in the readers, and to make emotional implications as to characters, situation, and significance in literary texts.

What is the role of book history (or the materiality of publication) to the creation of emotion in and surrounding a text and the codex itself. Is there a way to effectively combine the learned lesson of genre and material culture to better articulate and analyze the meaning of emotion in literature?

Participants expressed a particular satisfaction with the way in which the Study Day was set up: as roundtables, with short presentations (many of them “in progress”, followed by discussion. Those who gave papers sat with the “audience” participants and we were in a room that was set up in a roundtable configuration, with no head or assigned seating for the panel participants. Assigned readings and discussion (no more than three, totaling about 60 pages of reading); and finally a summarization of the topics we covered as well as a requests to explore other topics more specifically and/or deeply.

Suggestions for future Literary Emotion Methodologies Study Days

I therefore suggest the following ideas for consideration for a Literary Emotions Methodologies Study Day (“LEM, Part Deux”…?) expected to take place in 2014 at the University of Queensland.

The use of a primary text (short-ish) as a base for textual examination throughout the day. It was suggested that this text might be two versions

of a single text in translation or adaptation (for instance a Beowulf and Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf) as a place to see differences in emotional depiction on other languages or eras.

Two roundtables panels (no more than four papers of no more than 15 minutes). I suggest that these topics be requested from the list of bulleted above.

A discussion based on the pre-circulated readings of Scheer and Spinoza.

Perhaps a panel discussion based on no more than three pre-circulated papers by participants (papers that are close to publication, for instance).

A session where findings are synthesized and new questions are asked.

A discussion of specific publication outcomes that are likely from the Study Day.

A discussion of a possible Collaboratory based on Literary Emotions.