Nothing More than Feelings: Texts & Affects
Valerie Ross profile
T 5:30-8:10
This course will examine how emotions are represented in a variety of texts (fiction, poetry, ads, music, film). We will survey the four prevailing theories of emotions and consider these in relation to theories and emotions of modernity. We will ponder, for example, whether Poe's man of the crowd feels the same as Baudelaire's. We will closely examine a few emotions (maybe boredom, laughter, shame, and love) and consider whether emotions are universal or specific to particular historical moments, cultures, individuals, and genres. We will also explore the emotions in relation to such topics as social change, memory, and the body, as well as the complex relationship between emotion and metaphor, with which modernists coolly grappled. Throughout we will dwell upon how texts represent, invoke, incite, create, teach, and theorize about emotions. Authors/texts/musicians/comics under consideration: Eliot, Bogan, H.D., Stevens, Wright, Stein, Millay, Hurston, cummings, Dos Passos, Stanislavski, Beckett, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Poe, Freud, Melanie Klein, Henry and William James, Darwin, Birth of a Nation, Joy of Cooking, Nathanel West, and Ivory Soap.
updated 2006-10-20
