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.

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 Catherine Lutz, Renato Rosaldo, and Emily Martin; philosophers Alison Jaggar, Catherine Lutz, and Martha Nussbaum; historian Peter Stearns; sociologists Arlie Hochschild and Candace Clark; and social and cultural theorists Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson. We will also read some key work on the emotions from psychoanalysis, including Freud, Melanie Klein, 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 (including loss as a diasporic emotion); 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); Jane Lazarre’s autobiographical book Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery (1998); 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, Douglas Crimp, David Eng, Brian Massumi, and Eve Sedgwick as well as by feminist Berenice Fisher, media theorist Patricia Mellencamp, philosopher Elizabeth Spelman, and the discourse theorist Rukmini Nair.

In addition to contributing fully to the course in terms of reading and engaged discussion, students will 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. A twenty-page essay will be due at the end of the quarter.

Lauren Berlant, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, will give a lecture in tandem with the course on Monday, February 9, 2004, as part of the Simpson Center’s 2003-2004 Lecture Series on Emotion and Affect. Berlant is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1977) and the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on compassion. She is working on a book entitled The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. She will also offer a seminar based on discussion of one of her essays on Tuesday, February 10, 2004. On June 1-2, 2004, the anthropologist Emily Martin, who is working on mania, will visit the University of Washington as part of the Lecture Series on Emotion and Affect. Several other faculty members at the University of Washington are also working on the emotions, including, in English and Comparative Literature, Carolyn Allen, Steve Shaviro, and Woodrow Wilson Fellow Jodi Melamed. There will be occasions for us to hear about their work.

Note: 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 a 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.