Mood

6 Key excerpts on "Mood"

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  Style and Emotion in Comic Novels and Short Stories

  • Agnes Marszalek(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  affective tone , which, once established, will have a long-term effect on subsequent reading. Affect in literary reading, according to Miall, is ‘anticipatory’, meaning that it pre-structures our understanding of the text early in the reading process (1989: 56). The anticipatory quality of affect shapes our interpretation of literary texts. Once a certain tone has been set up, the reader will be predisposed to comprehending the text in concordance with that particular feeling.

  3.1.2. Mood in literary and film studies

  In literary criticism, the term ‘Mood’ is rarely used on its own merit, but rather as an auxiliary to describe two other concepts – atmosphere and tone of literary texts. Even a basic review of a number of dictionaries of literary terms reveals that not only are both atmosphere and tone defined as Moods evoked by literature, but that the three concepts can in fact be used interchangeably (e.g. Baldick 2008: 336; Abrams and Harpman 2012: 18–9). Atmosphere and tone are described as qualities of texts rather than those of readers, yet they seem to generally refer to the way a literary work makes us feel: the Mood it evokes in us.

  Stylistics and narratology focus on the notion of tone to suggest, for example, that a certain overall tone (e.g. ironic, intimate) can be adopted by the narrator or the implied author as part of the modality (or point of view , Genette 1980) of the work (Wales 2011: 425). A comprehensive stylistic account of tone has been developed by Leech and Short (2007: 225–9), who, like Wales, link it to discoursal point of view , which they see as the relationship between the implied author (or other addresser) and the fiction, expressed through the structure of the discourse. Part of this relationship is the authorial tone , that is, the position taken by the (implied) author towards the readers, and towards the message (2007: 225). An important consideration here is that of symmetry between the attitude expressed by the author and that evoked in the reader (which may be close, but not complete), and the related notion of distance

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  Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion

  An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind

  • Michael Burke(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Literature, one could say, is all about words and sentences. From my position as a university lecturer in rhetoric and English, I believe, however, that literary reading is about far more than just lexis and syntax. This is not an easy admission for a stylistician to make—equivalent perhaps to a barrister saying that justice is about more than just laws and statutes. Nonetheless, I believe it to be true. Readers create meaning not solely by perceiving and processing words on the page; they are also affected by a whole scale of interactive, largely non-textual, phenomena that constitute important inputs that go into the meaning-making confluence of literary discourse processing. This is what this chapter will show, beginning with the phenomenon of “Mood”.

  When I use the term “Mood” in this work I do not mean it entirely in the strict psychological sense of the word as it was described in a previous chapter, namely, affective states of relatively long duration often elicited by an internal event (Frijda 1986: 252–53). Rather, by Mood I mean a primarily subconscious and somatic pre-reading state that plays a distinctive role in the reading process. In effect, Mood is a positive kind of feeling that a reader can get once a mainly subconscious “decision” has been made to engage with a literary work. This is not a simple process. Manguel confirms this when he suggests that meaning in literary reading comes about “through a vastly entangled method of learned significances, social conventions, previous readings, personal experiences and private tastes” (1996: 37). The diversity of pre-reading Mood is described by the twentieth-century novelist and academic Harold Brodkey in his 1985 essay Reading, the Most Dangerous Game

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  Modernism à la Mode

  Fashion and the Ends of Literature

  • Elizabeth M. Sheehan(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness &c. The fashion world at the Becks—Mrs. Garland was there superintending a display—is certainly one; where people secrete an envelope which connects them & protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies. These states are very difficult (obviously I grope for words) but I’m always coming back to it. The party consciousness, for example: Sybil’s consciousness. You must not break it. It is something real. You must keep it up—conspire together. Still I cannot get at what I mean.

  —V IRGINIA W OOLF, Diary

  For anthropologists Jennifer D. Carlson and Kathleen C. Stewart, “Mood work” refers to the individual and collective labor of “sens[ing] out what is actual and potential in an historical moment or a situation.”1 This process is both subject and method for Carlson and Stewart. As they seek to make legible “emergent patterns of everyday life and their poetic force,” their technique brings together ordinary and scholarly ways of reading, as well as literary, literary critical, and social scientific modes of inquiry.2 Such an approach draws from a tradition of affectively attuned cultural studies epitomized by Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” which he defines as the “set” of “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone” in a given time and place.3 Williams compares changes in structures of feeling over time to the changes in language captured by “the literary term ‘style’ ” and indicates that “similar kinds of change can be observed in manners, dress, buildings, and other similar forms of social life.”4 Yet, whereas Williams offers an analogy between feelings, literary style, manners, and dress, Mood can be conceived more capaciously. In the introduction of the special issue of New Formations in which Carlson and Stewart’s essay appears, Ben Highmore and Julie Bourne Taylor propose that Mood “incorporates the entire situation as well as the ‘players’ within it” and “is made up of individual and collective feelings, organic and inorganic elements, as well as contingent, historical and slow changing conditions.”5 Like Virginia Woolf’s reflections on “frock consciousness,” such an understanding of Mood foregrounds how seemingly personal feelings are formed with and through objects, bodies, thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and historical conditions.6

  This approach to Mood offers a number of benefits. It shifts us away from an account of feelings as possessions that may pass between individuals toward an understanding of how emotions are produced by contact between objects, bodies, behaviors, and atmospheres.7 An understanding of Mood as made up of multiple “players” also offers a way for theorists of emotion and affect to avoid untenable distinctions between a bodily or “affective-corporeal” realm and one of ideology and history.8 For example, Carlson and Stewart’s Mood work, like many of Woolf’s texts, attends to how subjects negotiate the political ideas and forces that are woven into the texture and feeling of the everyday, thereby tracing connections between corporeal, affective, aesthetic, and political dimensions of mundane experience. In turn, Stewart suggests that close readings of everyday life may better equip us to grasp possibilities for social and political transformation than do more sweeping accounts of socioeconomic systems.9 She joins scholars such as Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed whose efforts to trace contemporary affective forms and dynamics offer ways of grappling with the possibilities and limitations of the present.10

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  How to Do Things with Narrative

  • Jan Alber, Greta Olson, Birte Christ, Jan Alber, Greta Olson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  I begin by considering the distinction between emotions and Moods. Emotions are intentional mental states in the philosophical sense of the word ‘intentional’: they are directed towards specific objects or situations; as such, they tend to be circumscribed and episodic (Solomon 1993, 112). Being nervous about missing a flight or frustrated after making a careless mistake in chess are examples of emotions, since they are intentionally directed at two states of affair (the missed flight, the chess blunder). Moods, by contrast, are diffuse and tend to lack a distinct intentional object. When I wake up ‘in a good Mood,’ for instance, everything looks somewhat different and I approach my daily tasks with energy and optimism. These feelings are not directed at anything in particular, but they pervade all my thoughts and interactions. One should not draw too sharp a line between emotions and Moods, though. We can be dejected or elated about something that happened to us, but when those emotions tinge one’s attitude towards life as a whole, they become Moods.

  The same can happen during audiences’ encounters with narrative. In an essay on “Art and Mood” (2003, 539–545), Noël Carroll argues that artworks can evoke Moods via emotional responses: an accumulation of emotions can tip our affective balance one way or another, leading to Moods. In the following section I will focus on this link between emotional responses and the Mood that emerges from a narrative. I will then complicate this account by turning to two additional factors. First, Mood is not just a function of narrative contents – the situations and characters represented by a text, and the circumscribed emotions they elicit – but of style and narrative structure as well. Second, I will argue that Mood should be theorized in terms of bodily feelings, as a shift in the audience’s embodied orientation towards the world. In the last part of this chapter, I will illustrate these claims through a case study. I will discuss a corpus of online reviews of Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), focusing on how Mood and related notions become a vehicle for audiences’ interpretive negotiations of the plot. This corpus is a subset of the over 2,000 online reviews published in the “Internet Movie Database” (IMDb) from the film’s release in 2000 to March 2015.11

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  Art of Comprehension

  Exploring Visual Texts to Foster Comprehension, Conversation, and Confidence

  • Trevor A. Bryan(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Not every piece of writing is going to have a Mood Structure. Some written pieces are built around a single Mood. For instance, if writing about “The Best Day Ever!” the student might express excitement and joy throughout the whole piece. In addition, it is common for poems and articles to be crafted around a single Mood. So an absence of Mood changes is not necessarily a problem. One clear and well-conveyed Mood may be enough if it suits the topic and genre.

  Writing Without Mood

  Some might argue that clear and well-structured writing doesn’t always need a strong sense of Mood. This is true. However, without creating a Mood, the writing will rarely be captivating. To demonstrate this, let’s look at another piece that Jo wrote. Although she tells the Mood, in this piece, she doesn’t use the Access Lenses to show the Mood. Her writing is clear, but it is also quite dry and reads like a list without much spirit.

  DANCE

  I love to dance. It is one of my favorite hobbies. I take classes every Tuesday and Friday. On Tuesday, I dance ballet for two hours and on Friday, modern, tap and jazz for three hours. When [I] dance I feel wonderful! It’s what I love to do. I have been dancing since I was 4 and never stopped. I go to dance at Spring Lake School of Dance. The teachers are so nice the lady who runs the place teaches there too. She was a former rocket [Rockette]!

  The poet Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” In other words, without Mood in the writing, the only Mood in the reader will most likely be boredom.

  Helping Students to Craft Moods: Visual References

  To draw something well, artists have to be able to see it. There are three ways that artists do this. One way is to stand directly in front of what they are drawing. Plein air landscape painters do this. They stand outside in front of the scene and paint using direct observation. Another way that artists see is by picturing their subject in their head. Comic book artists and cartoonists often do this type of work. They see using their imagination. The third way that artists see is to use references, such as drawings or photographs that they can refer to. The reason I bring this up is because these practices can be applied to writing as well.

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  Cultural Feelings

  Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics

  • Ben Highmore(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  Feeling Our Way and Getting in the Mood

  (An introduction)

  This book is about feelings and Moods. But it isn’t about Moods and feelings as internal states, experienced by individualised sovereign subjects. Or it isn’t primarily about that. We live across Mood-worlds. We live through a plethora of feelings. Some Moods and feelings are dramatic and intense; their presence is emphatic, insistent. Other feelings are relatively inconspicuous because they occur too often to be noticeable, or because they saturate a particular situation. Some are just a low hum. We don’t notice the Mood of the place where we work until it is somehow ‘off’. But the day-to-day Mood of our workplace isn’t the absence of Mood. We know this because it is significantly different from the atmosphere in our homes, even though we might not notice that Mood either. All of the feelings we experience are relational – my boredom, for instance, is directed towards something even though it feels so internal and empty to me – and to a greater or lesser extent those relations are deeply entwined with the social worlds that we inhabit.

  This book is concerned with Moods and feelings as social and historical qualities. As a modest claim, I want to suggest that Moods and feelings are an important aspect of the world, and that we need to take account of them. More immodestly, I want to claim that unless we attend to Moods and feelings we are not engaging in the sociality of social and cultural enquiry. How the world feels to us, and how it has felt to us, is the phenomenal form of the social: this quality is the sense of promise and defeat, of opportunities found and lost, of ease and disquiet, of vibrancy and dourness.

  In the chapters that follow, I work both theoretically and historically to chart some of the ways that Mood, feeling and atmosphere help us to describe various periods and moments of British post-war social and cultural history. In the next chapter I will explain more precisely why I’m using a word like ‘feeling’ rather than the more theoretically elaborated term ‘affect’, and why I’m conjoining feeling with the equally vague term ‘Mood’. For now, I just want to say that I don’t subscribe to the definition of ‘feeling’ in a statement such as: ‘feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal

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