CFP: Reading Emotion (5/10/05; SAMLA, 11/4/05-11/6/05)

Proposals are invited for a Special Session at SAMLA, Sheraton
Colony Square Hotel, Atlanta GA Nov 4-6, 2005.

Special Session: Reading Emotion

In 1872, Charles Darwin wrote that "expression in itself, or
the language of the emotions, as it has sometimes been called,
is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind." Darwin
theorized that powerful emotions were universal, rooted in
human biology. But emotions are also particular and
historical, gathering a tense significance, a new color or
predominance, from a person’s often unexamined experiences
under economic and political conditions and within a set of
complex yet identifiable social structures and habits. Envy,
pity, and shame, compassion, revulsion, and the desire to be
happy--these feelings take on new shades of meaning in the
context of Locke’s legacy of political transparency and Mill’s
individualism, of the requirements of justice in a democracy
and "the liberal horror of adult dependency" (Richard Sennet).

The nineteenth-century novel’s unrepressed performance of
emotional states and the aesthetic conventions of melodrama
shaped the way emotion was structured and apprehended for a
generation or more of liberal subjects. How is emotion folded
into the execution of citizenship and the definition of the
self? How do Victorian writers represented emotion, and how
are those representations connected to political philosophy?
What is the relationship between the public delivery of
stories, the emotions that are presented to and experienced by
readers, and the development of social consciousness?

Send electronic proposals (250-500 words) by May 10 to Annette
Federico (federiar_at_jmu.edu).

Annette Federico
Dept. of English
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807

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Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 20:28:59 EDT