English 822.001 - EMOTION THEORY

Winter 1995

Julie Ellison jeson@umich.edu
Office Hours Wednesday 1-3:30 and by appointment
7617 HH

TEXTS

Books available at Shaman Drum

• Carolyn Steedman, Legend for a Good Woman (Rutgers)
• Lutz and Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge)
• Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat (Vintage)
• Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard)
• Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (Columbia)

plus

Course Pack at Kelly's Kopies above Taco Bell across from SEB

ASSIGNMENTS

THE CONFIGURATIONS AND DYNAMICS OF EMOTION

The goal of the seminar is to keep all of these issues in play simultaneously.

• If "emotion " has now constituted itself as a "field" or "area," what is the secret of its success? Why here? Why now?
• aesthetics: the poetic; imagination and fancy; the beautiful and the sublime as theorized in work on romanticism and postmodernism; tone: parody, irony, pathos
• conventionality, manners, pedagogy, and other forms of emotional education and enforcement
• somatics: discourses of expressiveness, inspiration, and emotional contagion; the weeping, blushing, aggressive, and erotic body and its embarrassments
• performance and gesture
• gender: emotion as a major theme of women's, gay and lesbian studies and masculinity
• studies; the feminist literature related to emotion
• method: intuition; dialogue; logic, analysis, invocations of science and the rational
• nationalism, patriotism, and other civic emotions; the emotional relations of colonial and post-colonial societies; of commerce; of empire
• periodization: i.e. the Age of Sensibility
• subjectivity and intersubjectivity: the psychological treatment of emotion (hysteria, mourning, transference, and abjection); the genres of autobiography and confession; the philosophical, theological, and literary histories of love
• media: print culture, reading and media audiences, high and low cultures, electronic communications, virtual reality, interactive media
• the object of feeling; the representation of the victim, especially as defined by racial or social differences (slaves, criminals, vagrants, > the sick, the poor); the history of charity and social welfare; humanitarian movements
• intimations of the sacred: liturgy, confession, epiphany, revelation
• emotion and politics; ideological analyses of emotion

Emotion Bibliography

• Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments
• Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities
• Appleby, Joyce Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) .
• Aubry, "La Contagion du Meurtre"
• Bain, Alexander The Emotions and the Will (1859)
• Barker-Bendfield, G.J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
• Baym, Nina "Melodramas of Beset Manhood"
• Bellah, et al. Habits of the Heart
• Benn Michaels, "Race into Culture: A Genealogy of Cultural Identity" Critical Inquiry
• Berger, John "Bad News" The Threepenny Review Winter 1993 p. 39
• Berlant, "The Female Complaint" Social Text (and piece in Samuels, ed.
• "The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment")
• Bhabha, Homi "Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt" in Cultural Studies, Grossberg et al., eds. (New York: Routledge, 1991).
• Breitweiser, Mitchell American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative
• Brodhead, Richard "Spare the Rod" Representations
• Bystrom, "The Abyss of Sympathy: The Conventions of Pathos in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Novels" Criticism 1981
• Castle, Terry The Apparitional Lesbian
• Chambers, "The Suicide Tactic: Writing in the Language of the Other" from Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative
• ----- The Writing of Melancholy
• Cvetkovic, Anne Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism
• Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
• Davidson, Cathy, discussion of late eighteenth-century sentimental fiction in Revolution and the Word
• de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other
• de Sousa, Ronald, The Rationality of Emotion
• Discourse: articles in Fall-Winter 1990-91 stemming from conference on "The Emotions" at Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; also 14(1) Winter 1991-92 some articles on affect and tv
• Douglas, Ann The Feminization of America
• Elias, Norbert The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners: Changes in the Code of conduct and Feeling in Early Modern Times
• Ellison, Julie "Feeling Strange" ANQ; "Race and Sensibility in the Early Republic: Ann Eliza Bleecker and Sarah Wentworth Morton" American Literature Fall 1993; unpublished paper, "A Short History of Liberal Guilt"; "The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility," in Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, eds., Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776-1837 Empathy and medicine: new or forthcoming collection of essays
• Feld, Steven Sound and Sentiment: birds weeping, poetics, and song in kaluli
• Felman, Shoshona Testimony
• Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery 1760-1834
• Fisher, Berenice "Guilt and Shame in the Women's Movement: The Radical Ideal of Action and Its Meaning for Feminist Intellectuals," Feminist Studies 10:2 [Sum 1984] 185-212.
• Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority; also Declaring Independence
• Foster, Gaines M. "Guilt Over Slavery: A Historiographical Analysis," J. of Southern History LVI:4 1990, 670-71, 674-75).
• Fraser, Nancy Unruly Practices
• Freud, "On Mourning and Melancholia" (see Woodward's article in Discourse)
• Gibbard, Alan Wise Choices, Apt Feelings
• Goffman, Erving The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Grossberg, "Ideology and Affective Epidemics" and "Affect and the Popular" from We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture
• Hall, Catherine White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, esp. ch. 9, "Missionary Stories: gender and ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s"; also ch. 10, "Competing Masculinities" (Carlyle and Mill)
• Halttunen, Karen Confidence Men and Painted Women
• Haskell, Thomas "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility" (American Historical Review 90: 334-61 Apr 85; 547-66 June 85)
• Hass, Robert "Families and Prisons" and "My Mother's Nipples" Michigan Quarterly Review
• Herbert, T. Walter Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle Class Family
• hooks, bell Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics
• Hulme, discussion of "Inkle and Yarico," from Colonial Encounters (see Steele for Spectator selection)
• Intro/ Abu-Lughod, "Shifting Politics in Bedouin love poetry"/ Lutz on "gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in American discourse" / Trawick, "Untouchability and the fear of death in a Tamil Song"; Arjun Appadurai, "Topographies of the self: praise and emotion in Hindu India"
• Jameson, Frederic Postmodern Culture, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
• Kaplan, Alice French Lessons
• Kaplan, Cora, from Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism
• Karen Halttunen on Lucretia Chapman trial
• Kasson, Michael Rudeness and Civility
• Kleinman and Good, Culture and Depression
• Koestenbaum, Wayne The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
• Kristeva, Julia The Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun
• Lang on "Class and the Strategies of Sympathy"
• Lamb, Charles Elia, 1823 facsimile edition (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991). Essay on London beggars.
• le Bon, Gustave The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
• Lehuu on Godey's Lady's Book and images of motherhood
• Lockridge, Kenneth, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage (the commonplace booksof Byrd and Jefferson)
• Lorde, Audre Sister/Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984).
• Lovell, Terry Consuming Fiction
• Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesion Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory
• Lutz and Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion
• Lutz and White, "The Anthropology of Emotions" Ann Rev Anthro 1986 15.405-36
• Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, The Differend
• MacKenzie, Henry The Man of Feeling
• Markus, Hazel and Kitayama, Shinobu Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence
• Marshall, David The Surprising Effects of Sympathy
• Mellencamp, Patricia High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy
• Miller, Nancy K. "Facts, Pacts, Acts" Profession; "Autobiographical Deaths" Massachusetts Rev. 33(1); Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts
• Miller, William Humiliation
• Morris, David The Culture of Pain
• Mullen, John Sex and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
• Nussbaum, Martha Love's Knowledge
• Okin, Susan Moller, "The Making of the Sentimental Family" Philosophy and Public Affairs 11(1) 1981
• Peck, Janice "TV Talk Shows as Therapeutic Discussion: The Ideological Labor of the Televised Talking Cure" (unpublished paper)
• Pocock, "Virtue, Passion, and Commerce" in Virtue, Commerce, and History
• Probyn, Elspeth Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Theory
• Radway, Janice Reading the Romance
• Rorty, Amelie, "Explaining Emotions" from Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind
• Rosaldo, Renato Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
• Samuel, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality
• Samuels, slavery and the body; Joy Kasson on "The Greek Slave"; Dana
• Nelson on "Sympathy as Strategy in...Hope Leslie"
• Sanchez-Eppler, "Bodily Bonds: The Intersection Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition" in Samuels, ed.
• Scarry, Elaine The Body in Pain
• Scherer, Facets of Emotion
• Schiesari, Juliana The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
• Sedgwick, Eve Epistemology of the Closet
• Shklar, Judith Ordinary Vices
• Shweder and LeVine, eds. Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion
• Silverman, "Whig Sentimentalism" in The Cultural History of the American Revolution
• Smith, Adam The Theory of Moral Sentiments eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982)
• Smith, Paul Discerning the Subject
• Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, "The Female World of Love and Ritual" Signs 1:I
• Sollers, Werner Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture
• Sommer, Doris Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America
• Spencer, Herbert Principles of Psychology
• Steedman, Carolyn Landscape of a Good Woman
• Steele, Shelby "White Guilt," American Scholar 59 Autumn 1990, 497-506.
• Stewart, Susan On Longing
• Stoler, Ann "'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives" Representations 37
• Tarde, Gabriel, "The public and the crowd"
• Taussig, Mick "Culture of Terror, Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture" Comp Stud in Soc and Hist 26:3 1984
• Taylor, Charles Sources of the Self
• Tochin, Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville
• Todd, Janet Sensibility: An Introduction
• Tompkins, Jane "Criticism and Feeling" in College English 39 Oct 1977; "Me and My Shadow" in Criticism and Theory, ed. Linda Kaufman; Sensational Designs
• Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family
• Williams, Bernard Shame and Guilt
• Williams, Patricia The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor
• Williams, Raymond "Structures of Feeling" in Marxism and Literature
• Wood, Gordon S. "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" William and Mary Quarterly July 1982 (39) I 401-441