13157

WiSe 14/15: Emotions, texts and bodies

Laura Kounine

Information for students

language is English

Comments

It is now agreed that emotions, bodies and texts have a history, that their meanings are socially and culturally dependent, and that they are time and space specific. Emotions, bodies and texts are more than just discourses, however, but also have a physical and material history. Through a series of in-depth readings, this course will seek to discuss, debate and conceptualise notions of 'emotions, bodies and texts'. Through this focus, this course will also engage with ideas and understandings about gender, the self and subjectivity. It will further seek to historicise understandings about emotions, bodies and texts over the longue durée, from the early modern into the modern period, to understand how and in what ways understandings about these concepts - and gender and the person - changed over time. This course will be based on readings and discussion of theoretical and empirical works from a variety of disciplines such as history, philosophy and sociology, including Judith Butler, Joan Scott, Lyndal Roper, Erving Goffmann, Michel Foucault as well as micro-historical case studies. Joan Scott, 'Gender: a useful category of historical analysis', The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053-75. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, religion and sexuality in early modern Europe (London, 1994), chapter 1. Barbara Duden, The woman beneath the skin: a doctor's patients in eighteenth-century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA, 1991), chapter 1 'Toward a History of the Body' and conclusion. Erving Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life (Anchor, 1959), Introduction and Chapter 1: Performances. Davis, Natalie Zemon, 'Boundaries and the sense of self in sixteenth-century France', in Thomas. C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery (eds), Reconstructing individualism: autonomy, individuality and the self in western thought (Stanford, 1986), pp. 53-64. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York/London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 1-23. Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack, 'In Relation: The 'Social Self' and Ego-Documents', German History (2010) 28 (3): 263-272. Rosenwein, Barbara H. "Worrying About Emotions in History." American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821-45. close