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 Feeling
From Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Middle Ages
From 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 selfexploratory, 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.