This essay provides a revisionary interpretation of one of the most important treatments of emotion (and its relation to reason) in the early period of modern European vernacular literature, Guido Cavalcanti's “Donna me prega” (“A Lady Asks Me”). According to the prevailing interpretation, the poem denigrates love as an animal power, a subhuman force that destroys our properly human rationality. Reading the poem's treatment of love in the light of Averroës's views, especially as presented in his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De anima, reveals that Cavalcanti celebrates love as paradigmatic of human reason, part and parcel of one's leading a rational and therefore human life. Love, the operation of a rational power that is mortal (not immortal) and natural (not supernatural), is for human beings the “perfect good,” the full extent of our flourishing and the best for which we can hope.

Intellectual historians often credit S⊘ren Kierkegaard as existential anxiety's prime mover. Arguing against this popular sentiment, this essay reads Kierkegaard not as the ex nihilo inventor of existential anxiety but as a modern practitioner of a deep-historical, dread-based asceticism. Examining a wide range of Middle English devotional literature alongside some canonical works of modern existentialism, it argues that Kierkegaard and the existentialists who followed him participated in a Judeo-Christian tradition of dread-based asceticism, the popularity of which had dwindled since the Middle Ages but never vanished. Following medieval ascetics, modern philosophers like Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre cultivated and analyzed anxiety in an effort to embody authenticity. By considering premodern ascetics early existentialists and modern existentialists latter-day ascetics, the essay sees the long history of existential anxiety as an ascetic tradition built around the ethical goal of living better through dread.

Modern critical reception of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women has been unequivocal in its resistance to the pathos of the text, but, despite this resistance, the Legend makes us feel pity regardless of our rational intentions. To this end, the Legend and its prologue are thematically and structurally unified, and together they provoke an unsettling awareness that our emotions do not belong entirely to us. For Chaucer, the art of feeling pity maps onto the art of writing poetry in that both involve performed sincerity that is not insincere for being performed, a kind of authentic inauthenticity. The paradox of emotional experience is thus the paradox of poetic creation: what feels most uniquely yours is in fact learned, acquired, and imitative.

To understand what it feels like to read, we might consider what it feels like to have difficulty reading. Those who find it hard to read reveal the demands posed by a modern world that requires literacy even as it raises obstacles to reading. In this situation, the attempt to read can become pathetic: a site of suffering and reflexivity. Beginning with moments in the works of Walter Benjamin and his follower W. G. Sebald, we learn about the pains of reading as they open onto the pains of history in the cities of twentieth-century Europe. But Benjamin's and Sebald's insights on vision, pain, and history are anticipated in a series of sonnets by John Keats, written in metropolitan London in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Pity and gratitude are often classified among the moral emotions: pity responds to an undeserved ill that has befallen another, while gratitude affirms as good something given to us, as well as the agent who gave it. To some philosophers, however, pity and gratitude are never or rarely appropriate. For the Stoics, pity is unnecessary suffering for the person who pities, grounded in a mistaken view of what constitutes privation; Wollstonecraft and Godwin add that in a just society, there would be no pitiably needy people. Similarly, if assistance is reconceived as something due a person as a right, then the obligation to feel or express gratitude, or to render reciprocal service, is largely eliminated. Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice is indebted to the Stoical, pitiless, and gentle Houyhnhnms of Gulliver's Travels, and it prompts in turn Wordsworth's representations of interpersonal encounter in “Simon Lee,” The Ruined Cottage, and The Prelude.

The discourse of enthusiasm in the antebellum United States played a pivotal role in cultural debates surrounding the right of black people to participate in the “age of Revolution,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called the era in 1837. This argument is explored through the textual archive of Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831). During this period, enthusiasm could refer to either a democratic-sublime or a fanatical-delusional passion for freedom. The term was applied to Turner pejoratively, not so much because his rebellion represented an instance of wild fanaticism to white audiences but because it represented an instance of familiar democratic revolt inadmissibly claimed by black people. Turner makes his own rhetorical claims for the meaning of enthusiasm: the word signifies an ardent zeal that inspires both direct dissent against slavery and acts of communication that transmit to readers a fervor for occluded black freedoms.

Oscar Wilde's face was simultaneously maligned and celebrated by the “sciences” of physiognomy in the nineteenth century and, after the trials of 1895, in depictions that link Wilde to a pathologically expressive personality type. Personality and modern vision converge in the subject of Wilde's face, and their relation is illuminated by recent debates about affects and the emotions as well as by the theories of visual modernity advanced by Charles Baudelaire, Max Beerbohm, and E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris . Whereas early caricatures of Wilde invest the image with a readable psychology or interior, later depictions maintain a fiction of readability linked to a purely physiological notion of abnormal personality.

A work of classical Indian theory and practice, Bharata's Nāṭyashāstra offers a comprehensive account of emotion and of the production, communication, and reception of representations of it in dance, music, poetry, and theater. This essay examines remarkable points of convergence and divergence between the third-century Sanskrit text and three influential modern Euro-American accounts: Charles Darwin's mapping of involuntary expressions of emotion in human beings and animals, William James's aggregation of emotions in the stream of consciousness, and Sylvan Tomkins's atlas of primary affects that links neurobiology and cybernetics. My comparative analysis highlights the Nāṭyashāstra's contributions to our understanding of the connections of emotion to cognition, consciousness, and causality; of the combinatorial constitution of emotions; and of treatments of emotion in contemporary affect theory and performance theory. The essay concludes with an exploration of Bharata's and Aristotle's models of mimesis and of their mutual differences regarding the representation of emotion in the verbal and performing arts.

Reviving Thomas Hobbes's definition of the passions as interior motions that originate action, this essay considers the case of insensibility: an absence of feeling that results in immobility. Embodying this lack of feeling is the figure of the insensible, whose signature nonresponsiveness provokes the most vehement emotions in others. Through readings of Hobbes's theories of resistance and contempt, Adam Smith's condemnation of impassivity, and Herman Melville's tale of an “unmoving” scrivener, I examine how insensibility challenges the model of emotions as causes, as accounts of how a moved body moves. Insensibility confuses distinctions between bad feeling and no feeling, agents and patients, living and dead. Finally, I argue for narrative's surprising dependence on the nonnarrative presence of the insensible, a subject that reaches back through the history of philosophy to Aristotle's unmoved mover, the first cause of the universe that makes all motion possible by not being subject to motion itself.

In a letter Franz Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer in January 1913, he describes himself as a “great laugher.” Although Kafka is conventionally associated with anxiety, gloom, even terror, his laughter is joyful.

The middle english pearl is one of the most moving and beautiful poems ever composed. occasioned, it seems, by the death of a two-year-old daughter, whose identity has never been determined, it casts the grieving narrator-father as one who has treasured the child as a jewel beyond compare. She was round and smooth, rare and radiant—a precious pearl fit for a prince. Yet this dear small thing just slipped away one day in the garden, tumbling down through the grass into the dark earth:

As this opening stanza reveals, Pearl relies on the polyvalence and sensuous power of poetic language for its affective effects, gathering associative resonance through shifting meanings, working through indirection and allusiveness, tapping into the sensory power of visual and tactile images and patterned sound, and leaving much unsaid, to be grasped and felt between the lines. But the poem's broad emotional arc is clear. It scripts a therapeutic narrative of affective experience, taking its reader, whom it enfolds within the textual “I” of the poem, from “woe” to “weal” (56, 1187).

We now recognize that renaissance manuals of conduct, in which thinkers such as castiglione and erasmus sought to encode canons of polite behavior, are a major source of evidence about early modern emotions. But scholarly understanding of the relation between conduct literature and Renaissance society's management of emotions had to wait for the publication of the sociologist Norbert Elias's two-volume work Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (The Civilizing Process [1939]), which only began to reach anglophone critics in 1978.

Not far into the first volume of laurence sterne's tristram shandy, we are presented with the death scene of yorick, the country parson who plays a central role in the novel. Yorick has barely made his appearance before his death is lamented in one of the novel's most arresting passages. This death scene is unexpected and out of sync with the way the story has been told so far. Readers are not yet aware that events transpire according to a system all their own; nor do they realize that in Tristram Shandy death is implicit in the lives of its characters as perhaps in no other novel, certainly no other comic novel, of the last half of the eighteenth century. Of course, in Tristram Shandy there is no law about when things happen or how they relate to matters around them, except some supple notion of memory and the association of ideas, as articulated by John Locke. Still, Sterne, who uses the self-effacing parson to represent himself, has made no bones about his ill health and how short a time he has for writing his novel, and in that sense this scene could be placed anywhere and it would be perfectly intelligible. One critic, at least, reads the novel as a direct reflection of Sterne's awareness of his own mortal illness.

I would like to suggest that we use the term emotionality instead of emotions. this will avoid the taxonomic impulse at work when we take specific emotions and name them as objects of our inquiries. These taxonomies render emotions more stable than they are and create a hierarchy of the most talked-about or salient emotions (like melancholy, for queer studies, or fear, for political theory). More abstract than emotions, the term emotionality can take on the quality of a name and thus allow us to think together with emotionality the way one may think something through with another person. This essay will define emotionality as minimally as possible so that its particulars are allowed to shift and change.

What happens when i watch a creature suffer or when i share in my dog's joy? what is the power of these emotions, what do they teach me about living with animals and engaging ethically with their differences? While these questions may still seem sentimental to some, they have become increasingly relevant to those who study animals. Emotions have made a remarkable comeback in recent animal literature and philosophy. Rehabilitated by a new wave of theorists, they have found their way into some of the most provocative contemporary reflections on animal ethics. Josephine Donovan, Jacques Derrida, Ralph Acampora, Donna Haraway, and others have all granted compassion theoretical pride of place. They share a critique of the rationalist bias of the justice-and-rights tradition and suggest that compassionate attention to animals is the “ground upon which theory about human treatment of animals should be constructed” (Donovan, “Attention” 174). For many such contemporary thinkers, then, compassion—a deeply affective way of sharing another's emotion—is the fundamental means of forging the ethical bond we have with nonhuman animals. Replacing the “calculable process” of current animal-rights theories with the emotional encounter of the other's living—and dying—reality, compassion offers a new understanding of responsibility and relationships (Wolfe, “Exposures” 19).

Literary representations of emotions fascinate us as readers; they connect to us logically and naturally because we experience in our daily lives many of the emotional events depicted in novels, plays, and poems. Students are intrigued by the similarities and differences between their everyday feelings and the emotions represented in literature. Emotions are thus interesting processes to study, and in classroom discussions and activities most students have something to say about them. For this reason, I use emotion (broadly defined) as an important subject of inquiry in my literature and culture classes. In what follows, I share a structured journaling assignment based on emotion that helps students read with more detail, improves their foreign language skills, and boosts their engagement with difficult subject matter.