Rethinking the Emotions

Seminar Organizers: Timothy Raylor, Professor of English and Clara Hardy, John E. Sawyer Professor of Liberal Learning

The emotions (or, as they were known until recently, the passions), are a subject that takes us to the very core of what it means to be human and which lies therefore at the heart of the humanities. Because, moreover, the emotions do not fall within the purview of any extant discipline, an interdisciplinary approach is demanded. In recent years, the topic has attracted attention from students of moral and political philosophy, rhetoric, literature, social history, art history, music, linguistics, languages, psychology, and neuroscience. As ad hoc conferences and collections have given way to permanent research centers, a journal dedicated to the field, and a highly-regarded book series, the field has achieved institutional maturity. We are at an opportune moment in the study of the history of emotion.

The goal of the seminar is to bring together a small group of faculty who are working on the emotions from complementary disciplinary, geographical, and historical perspectives: scholars who will, by virtue of their varied expertise and approaches, be able to offer fruitful commentary on each other’s work in progress.

The seminar will reread and critically discuss some of the central texts of the western tradition in light of recent challenges to the universality of our emotional categories, and will examine arguments among different philosophical and scientific approaches to the emotions: arguments over what they are, how they operate, and where they are located.

We anticipate a wide range of fruitful conversations as these readings intersect with faculty projects.

  • Are emotions peculiar to humans, or do animals also experience them?
  • How might specific emotions be differently understood in different times and places? (It has been argued, for instance, that the Ancient Greeks held no concept of guilt, and that Greek understandings of anger and shame differ radically from our own.)
  • In what ways might a social or political community fear disruption or seek solidarity from the emotions of its members?
  • How do considerations such as class, race, or gender affect how cultures think and speak about emotions?
  • Do different genres of text (philosophical, legal, literary) or image evince distinct or common modes of describing or inspiring emotions?
  • How far have such texts shaped our conceptions of emotions?
  • How might one go about writing the history or histories of emotions?

2019-20 Faculty Fellows

Jorge Brioso, Professor of Spanish, will be working on his book, A History of Sanity, exploring etymological and philosophical connections between sanity (Spanish: cordura) and the heart (Latin: cor, cordis) as the place where philosophical traditions have situated the passions and emotions. In particular, he will focus on a chapter about “cordiality,” drawing on notions of affect and memory in Western thought and reaching to contemporary discussions about the affective turn.

Doug Casson, Professor of Political Science at St. Olaf, will be working on a chapter entitled, “Adam Smith and the Political Economy of Emotion,” which is part of a larger book project on the relationship of civility, honor, and the political passions in early modern political thought. He will explore accounts of the emotions as socially embedded and not merely internal states, and therefore as products of rhetorical and communal contexts that shape us as expressive agents.

Karen Cherewatuk, Professor of English at St. Olaf, will work on two chapters in her book project, Grief and Mourning in Malory. She will explore medieval notions of death, trauma, and loss in Malory’s romance, focusing not simply on characters who mourn a single loss, but on the transfer of emotive experiences from characters to audiences, who experience the deaths of many characters and feel the cumulative weight of all of these losses.

Jessica Leiman, Associate Professor of English, will write a chapter for her book project on eighteenth-century readers’ affective responses to fiction, looking at the role of the novel in cultivating these sympathies and facilitating the absorption of its lessons. In particular, she will focus on readers whose emotional investment in Samuel Richardson’s novels was so intense that they reenacted its key scenes and responded to the characters as if they were actual people.

Sarah Meerts, Associate Professor of Psychology, will write a paper that uses an animal model of social interaction that approximates the emotions of love and pleasure to investigate whether the birth of new neurons is enhanced by social behavior. She will seek to bring neuroscientific and humanistic understandings into dialogue as she explores the relations between different kinds of emotions and their effect on motivated behaviors and social bonding.

Susannah Ottaway, Professor of History, will be incorporating the history of emotions into two book chapters for the eighteenth-century volume of A Cultural History of Old Age. She will employ a new approach to the topic of family and community obligations to the elderly that will focus on affective, intergenerational relations, and will consider different understandings of social bonds as duties or as expressions of love and affection.

Seminar Directors:

Clara Hardy, John E. Sawyer Professor of Liberal Learning, will be investigating how Athenians navigated feelings and memories of atrocities committed during the civil war that restored the democracy in 403BCE. In particular, she will examine the ways legal speeches evoke or condemn anger and envy, and particularly the extent to which responses to these dangerous political emotions were inflected by social class.

Timothy Raylor, Professor of English, will work on a parallel edition of the Latin and English digests of Aristotle’s Rhetoric prepared by the philosopher, Thomas Hobbes in his role as tutor to William Cavendish, third earl of Devonshire. This is part of a project that explores the process by which Aristotle’s theories of the passions were translated to modern Europe and introduced into the foundations of modern ethical and political thought.