PS-Surveying English Literatures: Emotion and the Narrative Mind in Neo-/Victorian Literature
Lenka Filipova
Comments
How do stories shape the way we feel, think, and imagine the lives of others? Why do some stories grip us immediately and hold on, while others fade quickly, and some reveal their power only long after the last page? How are the emotions we encounter in literature bound to the historical and cultural worlds that produced them, even when they resonate with our own? And what can the Victorian world, with its defining role in the evolution of the novel and its emotional codes, reveal when contemporary writers return to it with present-day understandings of mind and feeling?
This course brings together literary study, affect theory, and contemporary cognitive science to explore how Victorian and Neo-Victorian fiction represents the relationship between emotion, consciousness, and narrative form. Moving between nineteenth-century works and contemporary reimaginings of the period, we will consider how literary texts both depict and shape emotional life, and how these representations engage with changing understandings of the mind. Drawing on Lisa Feldman Barrett’s insights into the construction of emotion, Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural and political life of emotion and affect, and Keith Oatley’s writing on fiction as a simulation of social experience, among others, we will examine how narrative both reflects and transforms the ways we feel and think. Primary works will be paired with critical and interdisciplinary readings to trace evolving conceptions of emotion and the narrative mind over time.
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments