Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons: (on Literary Emotions)Rodopi, 2008 - 221 pages Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons is a literary approach to consciousness where Donald Wesling denies that emotion is the scandal or handmaid of reason--rather emotion is the co-creator with reason of human life in the world. Discoveries in neuro-science in the 1990s Decade of the Brain have proven that thinking and feeling are wrapped with each other, and regulate and fulfill each other. Accepting this co-creative equality, we reveal a new role for literature, or a traditional role we've repressed: literature as a set of processes in time where we've thought feeling through stories about the lives of imaginary persons. We need these stories in order to practice emotions for when we return to the world from reading. Donald Wesling argues that to be more accurate in our dealings with stories, we require a grammar of this new recognition, where we build up traditional stylistics by a more careful tracking of emotion-states as these are set into writing. The first half of Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons offers a creative stock-taking of the current state of scholarship on emotion, based on wide reading in several fields. The second half gives three focused studies, rich in examples, of emotion as cognition, as story, and as historical structure of feeling. |
Contents
7 | |
13 | |
23 | |
Part II Examples Cognitive Narrative and Historical | 85 |
A Role for Literature | 193 |
201 | |
217 | |
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action actual affect already argument body bring century changes chapter characters claim cognitive comes concept connect critics culture death define direct early elements emotion emotion-states essay estrangement emotion examples experience explanation face fear figure follow force give Hippolytus historical human idea images imaginary persons imagination intensity kind language lines literary literature lives logic London looking Marxism meaning metaphor mind narrative nature novel perform person Phaedra philosophical play plot poem possible practice question Racine reader reading reason reference relation Romeo scene sense sentence sequence social speak speech story storytelling structure of feeling surprise telling term textual theory things thinking thought tragedy tragic translated turn University Press utterance versions voice whole writing York