Rethinking Emotion

Rüdiger Campe, Julia Weber, Rüdiger Campe, Julia Weber

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110373363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

What are emotions, where do they originate and how are they brought into being? While from antiquity to early modernity, affects or passions were mostly conceived of as external physiological forces which act upon a passive subject, modern conceptions generally locate emotions within the subject. Drawing on the dichotomy of "interiority / exteriority" as a complex interdependent relationship, they mostly envision emotions as interior processes. Contemporary conceptions of emotion from such different fields as human geography, art history and cognitive sciences recently started to challenge this notion of internal emotions by developing alternative descriptions of externalized emotion.

This book reevaluates premodern, modern and contemporary conceptions of affects, passions and emotion by analyzing various historical manifestations of the discourse on emotion. Unlike most previous research, which ? especially in the German tradition ? often focused exclusively on the rise of the modern (Romantic) interiority without paying attention to the underlying dichotomy of "interiority / exteriority", this study aims to explore the historical preconditions, the internal logic and the possible shortcomings that inform our thinking on emotion.

Notes on Contributors

Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches and writes on German, French, and English literature and philosophy from the seventeenth to twentieth century. She is the author of several books and articles focusing on Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Lessing, Hölderlin, Racine, Diderot, Balzac, Proust, Austen, and Wordsworth, among others, and a contributor to the volume of contemporary social criticism she co-edited with Toni Morrison. She is a recipient of DAAD and Humboldt Fellowships and has served as invited International Fellow at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies.

Rüdiger Campe is Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received the Aby Warburg Research Award in 2002 and the Humboldt Research Award in 2011. His areas of research include the history of knowledge of literature since the early modern era, the history of rhetoric and aesthetics of the eighteenth century, and baroque theater. He has published extensively on techniques of writing, the theory of the novel, and authors such as Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, and Franz Kafka.

Daniel Cuonz holds a Ph.D. in Modern German Literature. He teaches at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen and has been a visiting fellow at Yale University in 2008–2010. His research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, the literature of the Age of Goethe, the relations between literature and religion as well as between literature and economy, and narratology.

David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at the Columbia University. He is best known for his work on psychological responses to art and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship. His current research concentrates on the relations between art and cognitive neuroscience; other areas include Dutch, Flemish, French, and Italian painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the history of science.

Bernhard Greiner is Professor Emeritus for German Literature at the University of Tübingen. He has been a guest professor at various universities in the U.S., Australia, China, and Israel (Walter Benjamin Professor at the Hebrew University, 2000–2002). His publications and research focus on comedy, tragedy, and theater, German Classical and Romantic literature, on law and literature, and German-Jewish literature.

Rebekka Hufendiek is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Basel. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a thesis on “Enactive Emotions. An Embodied Functionalist Approach” (2012). Her research interests include the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science, especially embodied and situated cognition, naturalist theories of the mind, and theories of emotion.

Hermann Kappelhoff is Professor of Film Studies and Director and Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at the Free University of Berlin. He has been a Max Kade Visiting Professor at the Vanderbilt University in 2009–2010. His research explores cinema and politics, media theories of emotion, and the history, theory, and analysis of audiovisual images.

Joel Krueger is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He has been a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Durham University and at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. He works on various issues in phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with a particular focus on empathy and social cognition.

Niklaus Largier is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University in 2006 and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2010–2011. He is in particular known for his work on mysticism and Meister Eckhart as well as the spiritual practices of flagellation. Currently, he is working on a book on imagination, practices of figuration, aesthetic experience, and notions of possibility. He has written and co-edited essays and books on medieval philosophy and literature.

Rainer Nägele is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Previously, he has been Professor of German at the John Hopkins University. His areas of research encompass literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis and he has published numerous books and articles on authors such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka or Heiner Müller.

Catherine Newmark was a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin from 2007–2013 and currently works as a journalist for the German National Radio (Deutschlandradio Kultur). Her research interests include the history of philosophy (with emphasis on antiquity and the seventeenth century), psychology and psychoanalysis, political philosophy, feminist theory, and ethics. Her dissertation examined philosophical theories of the emotions from Aristotle to Kant.

Beate Söntgen is Professor and Chair of Art History as well as Vice President for Research and Humanities at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She has been a fellow at the research group “BildEvidenz” at the Free University of Berlin in 2013. She works on art from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, especially on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and German painting, the cultural history and theories of the image, aesthetics of reception, and the history and theory of perception, affects, and the Intérieur.

Bernhard Waldenfels is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the Ruhr University of Bochum. He has held several guest professorships, in Paris, New York, Rome, Prague, and Vienna, amongst others, and has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Freiburg and Rostock in 2012. He is known for his work on the phenomenological tradition in modern philosophy and has published numerous books on phenomenological issues, such as otherness, dialog theory, order, and normativity.

Julia Weber is leader of the research group “Building Imagination: Literature and Architecture in Modernity” at the Peter Szondi-Institute of Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin. In her dissertation (2008) she analyzed aesthetic forms of multiple subjectivity in Pessoa, Beckett, and Mayröcker. She has been a Feodor Lynen Humboldt Fellow at Yale University in 2008–2010. Currently, she is working on a book project that focuses on the representation of emotion, spatiality, and architecture across different time periods.

Brigitte Weingart is Professor of Media Studies at Cologne University. She taught German Literature and Media/Film at Bonn University in 2004–2010, where she held a research fellowship in 2011–2012. In 2007–2009, she was a Feodor Lynen Humboldt Fellow at the Columbia University of New York. Her dissertation dealt with representations of AIDS in literature, film, and medicine. Currently, she is finishing a book length study on the genealogy, media aesthetics, and poetics of fascination from antiquity to the present.

1 De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Rethinking Emotion: Moving beyond Interiority: An Introduction
• I. Modes of Interiorization: Emotion before the Great Dichotomy
• II. Interiority/Exteriority: Thinking and Writing Emotion
• III. Thinking beyond Interiority: Reconceptualizing Emotion after the Great Dichotomy
• Notes on Contributors