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Literature and Emotions

Literature and Emotions

Publié le par Matthieu Vernet (Source : Christian Dahl)

Literature and Emotions Conference

March 24-25 2011, University of Copenhagen

From the excesses of fear and laughter in Aeschylus and Aristophanes to the provocative writings of contemporary novelists like Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek, or Michel Houéllebecq, literary history has clearly demonstrated that the capacity of describing, arousing, and distributing affects and emotions is a crucial function of literature. Nonetheless, the importance af affects and emotions to literature has often been neglected as a topic of major interest in modern literary criticism and theory. Strong emotional appeals in literature are often regarded as vulgar by literary critics, and affective reactions to literature are correspondingly thought to be inferior to those of critical interpretation. Such evaluations generally assume that affective and critical responses are mutually exclusive. Contemporary theory of emotions and much literary history beg us, however, to question such presumptions. When works of literature have a direct impact on public debate and opinion, it is almost always thanks to literature's capacity of affective appeal.

The aim of the conference is twofold. First it is to investigate literary ways of describing, unfolding, arousing and manipulating human affects and emotions. Second it is to discuss how literature's ways of describing, arousing, and distributing emotions interact with different cultural contexts. We call for papers that will address these assues, and preferentially papers that combine empirical investigations (historical or contemporary) sith a theoretical scope. Panels or individual papers may include topics like:

  • Affects and Emotions: Fear, Pity, Disgust, Rage, Schock, Offence, Love, Hate, Joy, Shame, Melancholy
  •   Genres: Satire, Comedy, Tragedy, Melodrama, Sentimental Novel, Grotesque, Horror.
  •  Concepts: Affects, Emotions, Passions, Expression, Simulation, Mimesis, Provocation, Raction, Aesthetic Emotions, History of Emotions, Literature and Politics, Literature and Rhetorics.

Keynote speakers:

Rita Felski, William Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, University of Virginia, editor of New Literary History

Winfried Menninghaus, Professor of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin, principle investigator of the Excellence Cluster research project Languages of Emotions.

For Participation, please send an abstract (200-300 words for individual papers, max 500 words for panels) and a brief CV to dmb@hum.ku.dk  by 1 February. Paper presentations will be scheduled to 20 minutes. For further information see our homepage: http://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/literature-and-emotions/

Conference contacts: Christian Dahl, Assistant Professor, PhD (cdahl@hum.ku.dk)  and Dennis Meyhoff Brink, PhD Fellow (dmb@hum.ku.dk).

The conference will take place at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, and is organized by the Section of Comparative Literature.