Literature and Emotion

Patrick Colm Hogan, Patrick Hogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138185203
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317289593
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literature and Emotion not only provides a defining overview of the field but also engages with emerging trends. Answering key questions such as 'What is emotion?' and 'Why emotion and literature today?,' Patrick Colm Hogan presents a clear and accessible introduction to this exciting topic. Readers should come away from the book with a systematic understanding of recent research on and theorization of emotion, knowledge of the way affective science has impacted literary study, and a sense of how to apply that understanding and knowledge to literary works.

1Why emotion and literature today?

As indicated in the introduction, the purposes of the present book extend ideally to furthering research programs in emotion and literature. The following chapters will be devoted principally to outlining some of the main areas in which these research programs have been developing. Before turning to these topics, however, it is valuable to indicate briefly why it is important to study emotion and literature today. In this chapter, I first note some of the sources for the rise of affect study. These sources suggest some reasons for viewing it as valuable and some reasons for viewing it with caution. I take this dual approach because the provenance of affect study gives it a degree of initial prestige. Again, affect study comprises both affective science and affective poststructuralism. The former derives its status from association with science generally and neuroscience in particular. The latter shares the esteem in which Grand Theory—the work of Derrida, Foucault, and others—is often held in the academy. In both cases, the bias associated with prestige means that it is important to recognize the limits of affect study, while also noting its general value and timeliness.

The situation with literary study—whether affective or not—is somewhat different. Perhaps because we live in an advanced capitalist society, social value often seems to be a function of a narrowly defined productivity, specifically productivity that enhances material wealth. The value of science in producing wealth is obvious. However, the literal payoff of literary study is not clear, and thus its value in any sense is called into question. Put somewhat crudely, the worth of affective science is likely to be assumed by all parties. But the worth of literary study may not be so readily accepted, at least by people who are not literary critics.

Even in a thoroughly capitalist society, the scope of evaluation is somewhat broadened by appeals to morality. Whether liberal or conservative, writers and readers tend to recognize a role for what literature teaches us ethically. In universities, this moral role is particularly emphasized as a sort of counterforce to the identification of value with market value or wealth productivity. It is at least part of the reason that Grand Theory is esteemed. For example, deconstruction seems more broadly prized as a tool for challenging the “binaries” (i.e., the hierarchized oppositions) of patriarchy or of heterosexism than as a theory of the way language actually works. Ethical evaluation is of course an important part of judging literary study. There are, however, problems with this tendency. Dominant views of political value seem often to be derived post facto, added to the use of a theory rather than motivating and justifying that use initially. In other words, it is often not entirely clear that a given theory or form of literary study does indeed have liberating consequences, in the sense of actually empowering otherwise disenfranchised people. Moreover, even when there are moral consequences, this focus is overly restrictive, constraining literary study to a sort of political campaign.

For these reasons, I have presented a rather fuller treatment of the purposes of literary study. Not all the purposes treated below will make an appearance in the following chapters. It is nonetheless helpful to be aware of their extent and diversity, in part not to reduce literary study to a single function and in part to point toward some ways in which the study of emotion and literature might be productively advanced in the future.

The rise of affect study

Writing early in the current millennium, Robert Emmons noted that “[o]ver the past quarter century, unprecedented progress has been made in understanding the biological, psychological, and social bases of human emotions” (“Psychology” 3). Emmons is speaking principally of research contributing to affective science. The observation is uncontroversial within academic and empirical psychology (including cognitive science, social psychology, and other sub-fields). There has been a similar development in affective poststructuralism. The bearing of all this on literature is no doubt obvious. But it is worth underscoring that, as Kringelbach and Phillips put it in their book treating neuroscience and emotion, “[f]or centuries, the real experts on emotions have been novelists, poets, artists, and creators of popular entertainment, but not generally scientists” (8). In other words, the explicit formulations of scientists are only now catching up with the implicit representations (and sometimes articulated generalizations) of literature and the arts.

The fact that affect study has seen enormous growth in recent decades is of course reason enough to devote attention to the topic, whether in connection with literature or independently. However, it is helpful to gain some sense of why this growth has occurred. These reasons may help sensitize us to both the likely strengths and the probable limitations of affect study in its current forms.

Recently, I was visiting another university where a class was reading some of my work on emotion and literature. I was asked to outline how I arrived at emotion study. In thinking about my personal trajectory, I isolated four main factors that contributed significantly to this outcome. I would like to take these personal reflections as a starting point, as I believe that their broad structure is generalizable. First, I found that a great deal of what led me to affect study was a matter of chance—whom I happened to meet, what books I happened to come upon (e.g., purchased by my wife), and the like. There is no doubt a great deal of randomness in the development of any research program, including those constituting affect study. For example, the prominence of particular writers in affective poststructuralism probably resulted in part from the accidents that formed the personal tastes of individual writers on affect theory, the preferences of editors at presses publishing their books, and so on. This sort of contingency is important because we tend to see the path of research programs as somehow necessary, as inevitable developments. In fact, things could have been very different. Recognizing this might help to foster the sort of questioning attitude that is so important to intellectual progress, but that is often replaced by intellectual conformism.

Of course, not everything was accidental. To some extent, my interests extended back to emotional propensities that had their roots in childhood, often connected with attachment relations. Like accidents, such motivational inclinations are contingent; they are not generalizable in their particularity. Accidents and dispositions contributed to my work in affective science and to Sara Ahmed’s work in affective poststructuralism, and so on for all the writers we will be discussing—and all their readers. The accidents and dispositions differ individually, making it difficult to say anything productive about accidents or dispositions in general. However, one point about dispositions is clear. We all have them, and they crucially involve emotions. That makes our concern with emotions both idiosyncratic and in some respects inevitable. Put simply, we care about feelings.

The remaining factors too are in part general and in part individually variable. The first is a general principle that broad social trends have a selection function on our interests and orientations. When I wrote on law and literature, that work was largely ignored by the profession. When I wrote on affective science and literature, that work got some attention, leading to invitations for further writing. This encouraged me to continue working in the latter area rather than the former one. Put in economic terms, there was a market for one sort of work, but not for the other.

There are at least two ways in which market factors are likely to affect academic research, whether in affect studies or elsewhere. The first is in selecting works for which there is already a market. Derrida, Foucault, and to a lesser extent Lacan were significant market forces at the time when affect theory arose in literary study. As affective science developed, neuroscience was and remains highly saleable among academics and even the general public. For these reasons, affect theory books relying on Derrida and Foucault, written in a poststructuralist idiom, were and are more likely to be pursued by editors at presses, recommended by referees, and so on. The same holds for affective science books that draw on neuroscience and illustrate their claims with images drawn from fMRI scans. The point here is simply that a certain degree of intellectual conformity is likely to be part of the intellectual trajectory of theory development. The fact that Derrida turns up in affect theory does not necessarily indicate that Derrida’s work is best suited to affect theory. It may simply suggest that Derridaean thought was prominent in the market that affect theory entered.

The second market factor is the apparent opposite. The entire structure of the academy—with its tenure and promotion systems, merit increments for salary, and so on—fosters a need for continual production of publications. Worse still, the rhetoric surrounding those publications seems to push inexorably toward claims that the new work is path-breaking, radical, even revolutionary. For example, in the course of my career, I have seen claims for works go from assertions that a given analysis “develops” or “extends” previous work, to “challenges” received opinion, to “destabilizes” standard views—or even destabilizes the very social foundations of those standard views. In this context, market innovation is necessary. To some extent, affect study was inevitable not only for psychological reasons, but for marketing reasons. It gave graduate students and faculty members a new set of topics to examine and publish on. I say this is the “apparent” opposite of the first market factor because, even when new work differs from prior work in topic, it is often continuous with that prior work in method. The ideas and idioms of Derrida and Foucault follow researchers into affective poststructuralism; fMRI scans illustrate affective science just as they illustrate studies of perception.

Having noted these skepticism-inducing factors, however, it is important to go on to the fourth contributor, which is what gives intellectual work its integrity. To some extent, I felt my work on emotion was the result of an attempt to give the most illuminating description and the most plausible explanation to the topic I was studying. For example, due to accidents of reading (related to an early interest in different cultures), I found that particular sequences of story structures recurred in many genetically and geographically distinct literary traditions (i.e., traditions that did not have a common origin or much interaction). When I sought to explain these patterns, the operation of emotion systems seemed to offer the best account—the account that explained the most data most elegantly and rigorously.

This point too is generalizable. Affective scientists do not worship fMRI scans; they analyze them in relation to behavioral, verbal, and other data, articulating the best explanations they are able to formulate. Those explanations are the “best” of those that occur to the researcher, and what occurs to the researcher is in part a matter of accident. Moreover, what explanations get published and disseminated is to some degree a function of disciplinary doctrine at the time (see Hogan, “Teaching” and references therein). Research programs—in affect study or elsewhere—are flawed. But they are not given up wholly to chance and market factors. There are insightful, hard-working, thoughtful people engaged in research programs. They think through issues and data in an attempt to understand them; they criticize and develop one another’s ideas and insights; they test hypotheses and even at times report their own failures.

The point is perhaps obvious in the case of affective science. But it holds for affective poststructuralism as well. Writers of that orientation are often deeply concerned with political and ethical issues. Indeed, their principal concern is often one of producing progressive political change. Faced with the apparent failure of left-wing analyses of and responses to sexism, racism, homophobia, imperialism, for example, they sought new means of understanding and opposing these social trends. The study of affect seemed to offer just such possibilities.

It is important to note that the development of research programs should not be understood too narrowly. They are not simply a matter of answering specific research questions (such as, “What accounts best for cross-cultural patterns in story structure?”). First, there are common modes of reasoning or types of explanation that extend across particular research agendas. These include common models for formulating descriptive and explanatory principles. Second, there are broad tendencies in research orientation, larger types of questions that are made the topic of research.

In the early days of cognitive science, the most prominent model for the human mind was the computer. Computers usefully analogize the structures and operations of information storage and processing. However, they are not well-suited to foster an interest in or attention to emotions. The shift away from a computer model thus contributed to “the affective turn,” as it is sometimes called. That shift was itself related to technological developments that allowed greater access to brain operation. Such technological developments alter the data available for research programs and are another source of alterations in research tendencies.

As to research topics, there is a striking tendency in intellectual history to shift between a focus on structures and a focus on events or actions. This division has been influentially treated by Paul Ricoeur in the context of structuralism and phenomenology. In keeping with this tendency, another broad shift in the orientation of cognitive science in recent years is that from a nearly exclusive emphasis on structure to a greater emphasis on events. Of course, work on structures continues, but the growing significance of event-based analysis is shown by the increased importance of, for example, “situated cognition” theory. (Situated cognition theory stresses the degree to which cognition is inseparable from the actual, particular conditions of its exercise [see Robbins and Aydede, “Short”].) As soon as we ask about events and actions (rather than latent capacities), our attention is likely to be turned toward motivation systems, thus emotion. In this way, the broader intellectual atmosphere, which has involved greater attention to events and actions, has also fostered (and in turn been fostered by) correlated attention to emotion.

In short, there are many reasons for the recent rise of affect studies. Some of these give us good intellectual reasons for tentatively accepting its various arguments and conclusions. Others caution us to approach these arguments and conclusions with a degree of skepticism. In both cases, they urge us to view affect study as a series of partially complementary and partially contradictory research programs that are highly fallible, but probably the best means currently available for understanding the complex and consequential topic of emotion.

The purposes of literary study

Having outlined some of the reasons for the rise of emotion study, we may now turn to some of the purposes of literary study. This may initially seem unnecessary—don’t we all know why we study literature? In fact, I suspect that the range of functions served by literary study is often underestimated. I do not mean to say that I am going to uncover heretofore unknown benefits of research into fiction. However, when the aims of criticism are enumerated, the list is usually a very abbreviated one, and one with little attention to emotion.

We might begin by drawing two initial, overarching divisions. First, there is the obvious distinction between understanding and evaluation, which is to say, purposes that concern description and explanation, on the one hand, and those that concern norms, on the other hand. Second, there is the less self-evident distinction between literature-oriented and world-oriented study. This division reflects the fact that we might examine literary works to understand more about literature or that we might examine literary works to understand more about some aspect of the world outside literature. For example, we might consider emotion in a literary work to achieve greater insight into the motives of characters in that work, but we might equally set our sights on using the work to learn something about emotion in real life.

Within descriptive, literature-oriented approaches, we may distinguish two kinds of scope: particular and general. Particularist forms of study seek to understand or respond to individuality—for example, the specificity of a given novel—commonly through interpretation. The most obvious forms of such particularist study concern the literary work. However, we might have particularist interest in the author or individual readers. For example, Norman Holland’s work on identity (e.g., in Five Readers Reading) in part concerns the particularity of readers. Turning to generalization, we find the broad, pattern-defined categories that subsume particular works, authors, and so on, including genres (for texts) and movements (for authors). Part of such generalization is the formulation of theories. Theoretical reflection expands our descriptive understanding to explanatory principles. Though theory itself is generalizing, it may concern either particular or general topics. Thus theory of interpretation treats particularity, whereas narratology treats such generalizations as genre.

Within normative, literature-oriented purposes, we may begin by distinguishing aesthetic and ethical–political concerns. Aesthetic response is particular and concerns our reaction to a literary work as an object of aesthetic pleasure, not only whether we find it beautiful or sublime (or ugly or banal), but also whether we find it exciting or boring, suspenseful, romantic, or whatever. The normative study of literature aimed at a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction : Getting emotional about literature
• 1 Why emotion and literature today?
• 2 The two faces of affect study
• 3 What is emotion?
• 4 Authors (I): Affective historicism
• 5 Authors (II): Expressivism
• 6 Readers (I): Enjoying literature
• 7 Readers (II): Learning from literature
• 8 Texts (I): Storyworlds and stories
• 9 Texts (II): Discourse and style
• Afterword: Affect aliens in the land of emotion studies
• Glossary of terms
• Further reading
• Works cited
• Index