The next work in progress seminar will take place on July 27 at 1pm in room 2.17, Arts Two. Brid Phillips (University of Western Australia) will give a paper titled: ‘“O well-painted passion!”: An analysis on the relationship between colour and emotions in Shakespeare’s Othello’. 

As usual, lunch will be available from 12.45 and all are welcome. Arts Two is number 35 on this campus map.

Abstract:

My project analyses and also demonstrates how colours were figured to express emotion in early modern drama, particularly in the works of William Shakespeare. On occasion Shakespeare uses colour references as a short hand to create emotional exchanges. Identifying and analyzing the employment and significance of colour in early modern literature and theatre uncovers the contemporary short hand embedded in these texts. Imaginatively, they provide a visual aid for the audience’s interpretations of the affective meanings and events in the play. Using contemporaneous ideologies embedded in rhetorical teachings, humoral theory, ideas concerning the body and its coverings, and the face and complexion, I investigate the relationship of colour to emotion. My work examines the nexus between the study of emotions and the use of colour in early modern drama which will tease out nuances of emotional expression hitherto untapped.

In my most recent research paper, “From Aaron to Othello: The changing emotional register of blackness in Shakespeare,” which I presented in Berlin, I discussed cultural exchange, blackness, and otherness in relation to Othello and Titus Andronicus. Building upon this work I am presenting a work-in-progress paper that arises from my concluding chapter which extends my analysis of Othello to incorporate the theories examined in the body of my research, namely, rhetorical learning, the humors, the body, and the complexion.

The next Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions work in progress seminar will take place on Wednesday 15 June. Eva Yampolsky (IUHMSP, University of Lausanne and Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris) will give a paper titled: ‘The pathology of suicide: a historical study of doctrines and practice in 19th-century France’.

Abstract:

At the turn of the 19^th century, with the birth of modern psychiatry and the penal transformations in France, medicine begins to redefine suicide and perversions as pathologies. I will focus here on the relationship between psychopathology and morality. Working specifically on French psychiatric texts, this ambivalent relationship becomes particularly evident in the language itself. While French etiological studies of insanity distinguish between le moral and la morale, a closer look at these studies reveals the ambiguity of these two concepts. I will try to show that the theorization of suicide and perversions as medical objects reposes on this conceptual ambiguity in the French psychiatric discourse, between the psychological faculties of the mind [le moral] and morality and social values [la morale]. Indeed, the shift from a juridical or a religious crime to a pathology is facilitated by this interiorization and embodiment of moral values. I will examine how morality as a group of social rules and values operates within medical theories on the mind. I will then show how this influence of morality on psychiatric theories allowed psychiatry to “appropriate” and redefine an entire spectrum of deviant behaviors.