Module description
How do we want to talk about emotions in comparative literature?
For some time, a common answer to this question might have been 'desire,' a term that often seemed ubiquitous in critical theory, and that, while slippery, could seem to speak to diverse literary periods, languages, and genres with little real need for translation. But with the waning (or transformation) of theory, an increasingly common answer might be 'through emotions history.' This field offers less an alternative vocabulary than a set of methods and questions for approaching not only the history of particular feelings, but the whole domain that we commonly call emotions (passion, affection, will, mood, affect, etc). What difference might this make to comparative literature?
This module takes love as its (usefully amorphous) case-study 'emotion,' and books as its primary object. It looks at how loving books has been represented within literature and discourse about reading, with a focus on the long eighteenth century. This is a period when a revolution in reading and feeling is often held to have taken place, and when emotionally-charged texts proliferated about how to read, how not to read, how to stop reading, and how to move between reading and reality. We'll put a core of novellas, images and essays by writers like Goethe, Barbauld, Hoffmann, Blake, Austen, Fuseli, and Nodier into dialogue with pre-modern and recent ideas about book love, from Horace to current literacy research and book art. By doing so, the module invites students to think about the long history of the so-called crisis of poor little books in the present, and the ways that texts encourage us to feel about reading.
Assessment details
1 x 4000-5000 word essay (90%) and 1 x Class presentation (10%)
Educational aims & objectives
This modules asks the question: how do we want to talk about emotions in comparative literature? It focuses on the case study of book love in the long eighteenth century in order to give students a deep understanding of why this period is so often seen as crucial to current ideas about both feeling and reading. Students will develop insights into a range of primarily British and German literary texts in this period, and will put their readings of these texts into dialogue with their own ideas about contemporary book culture, and with theories and methods from the history of emotions.
Teaching pattern
1 x 2 hour seminar, weekly