Instructor: Thomas Dodman
Research on emotions has boomed over the past two decades, so much so that is has become customary to speak of an “emotional” or “affective turn” across the disciplines. There is a palpable “gold rush” feeling in the air, in call for papers, specialized journals, dedicated book series, and interdisciplinary research centers. Of late, there is also a sense of urgency, as pressing social and political questions have come to stir passions in a way not seen since darkest days of the 20th century. Today, we talk compulsively of the politics of anger and resentment, of the frenetic pursuit of happiness and love, of our nostalgia for the past and our hopes and fears for the future – in other words, of how passions have come to shape our lives, perhaps more so than interests and reason itself. The rationale for offering this course stems from this surge in interest and an admission of partial failure on behalf of the humanities and social sciences—failure to, until very recently, fully appropriate for themselves an object of study long relegated to an unruly human part, impenetrable to the empirical protocols of scientific scholarship. How ironic, therefore, that our present infatuation with emotion should, by and large, result from a so-called “biological turn” and steadfast embrace of the natural sciences across the Arts. In recent years, this rush to plunder the hard sciences has led to the development of “affect theory,” “neurohistory,” “cognitive literary studies,” and the inevitable backlash against these crossovers—leaving as yet unanswered the question of whether a bridge across the (in)famous “two cultures” is possible, or even desirable. Eschewing both academic fads and knee-jerk reactions, this course takes on the challenges raised by these twists and turns, based on the double premise that there is no a-priori reason why the Arts and Sciences cannot mutually reinforce one another—after all, they did so quite happily not so long ago—and that scholars in the humanities and social sciences simply cannot afford to leave emotions out of the picture because of difficulties in devising satisfactory research protocols. As recent political events remind us, we cover our ears and stick our heads in the sand at our own risk.
