The Cultural Politics of the Emotions: Theories, Practices, Rhetorics, Poetics

This seminar proceeds from the assumption that studying the theorization, rhetorics, and expression of the emotions is itself a study in the politics and values of a culture. In the West, for instance, the emotions have been figured predominantly as feminine and in opposition to reason, with reason (or rationality) being accorded the higher value. This course will examine this implicit ideology of the emotions and will explore emotions themselves as a source of knowledge. That the emotions do not only vary from culture to culture but also have histories within cultures are guiding suppositions. That there can be a cultural poetics of the emotions is also key to this course.

The first three weeks of the course will be devoted to material on the emotions from anthropology, social and cultural theory, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychoanalysis that will serve as a crossdisciplinary introduction to the themes of the course as well as to the methodology of a phenomenology of the emotions. We will read work from anthropologists Michelle Rosaldo, Catherine Lutz, and Emily Martin; philosophers Alison Jaggar, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Elizabeth Spellman; historian Peter Stearns; sociologist Arlie Hochschild; and social and cultural theorists Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Brian Massumi, and Sara Ahmed. We will also read some key work on the emotions from psychoanalysis, including Freud, Julia Kristeva, and Christopher Bollas.
Other sections of the course will be dedicated to specific emotions (or affects and sensations): shame (with a focus on raciality); sentimentality and compassion in literary studies; grief (in the context of loss and diasporic emotions); and structures of affect in modernity and postmodernity, including the media and the neoliberalism of global culture. Texts include Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (1970); excerpts from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); Milan Kundera’s novel Ignorance (2002); Korean-born Deann Borshay’s film First Person Plural (2000), about her adoption by an American family, and Yvonne Rainer’s film (and its transcription) Murder and murder (1997), about the power of statistics in our everyday lives. In addition we will read work by literary and cultural critics Jane Tompkins, Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, David Eng, and Eve Sedgwick as well as work by feminist Berenice Fisher and media theorist Patricia Mellencamp. Last spring I finished the introduction and epilogue to my book on the cultural politics of the emotions and I will be including that in the readings for the course as well.

In addition to contributing fully to the course in terms of reading and engaged discussion, I will be asking everyone to participate in a group project that will focus on a particular emotion (one not discussed in class) and result in a collective bibliography (both in terms of critical texts and expressive texts); it will be presented to the class in mid-February. Each student will also make at least one short (very short) presentation to the class—a description of the approach and methodology of a critical essay or chapter. Every week we will also devote a short period of time to discussing rhetorics of the emotions as they appear in selected sections of the New York Times. A twenty-page essay will be due at the end of the quarter.

A Note on Distinctions: We will want to make distinctions among the passions, emotions, sensations, and moods. We can distinguish families of emotions, organized according to different structuring principles: rage, anger, and irritation; terror, panic, fear, anxiety, depression, and indifference; gratitude and envy, compassion and resentment; nostalgia and hope; aesthetic emotions, such as the sublime; nationalist emotions, such as patriotism; humiliation, shame, guilt, embarrassment, and self-disgust; happiness, joy, and ecstasy; grief, sorrow, and regret; religious emotions, including piety; what I have called the bureaucratic emotions, including bureaucratic depression and bureaucratic paranoia; and what I have called postmodern affects, such as statistical panic. We will also want to pay attention to the sequencing of emotions, or what might be called narratives of emotions.