Our next lunchtime work-in-progress seminar takes place on Wednesday 9 March. Our two project managers will each give a short talk:

Helen Stark (QMUL) A “Charnel-Vault”: Corpses in Walter Scott’s Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk

Describing the ploughing of the battle field at Waterloo, the titular protagonist of Walter Scott’s part-fictionalised travelogue Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1816) comments that ‘I should have been better pleased, if, […] the field where, in imagination, the ploughshare was coming in frequent contact with the corpses of the gallant dead, had been suffered to remain fallow.’ Dead bodies are invoked again in Paul’s description of the Museum de Monumens Français in Paris as a ‘charnel-vault’ where each pillaged painting ‘has its own separate history of murder, rapine, and sacrilege’. Despite this suggestive engagement with Waterloo, Paul’s Letters has been the subject of little sustained critical analysis. This paper will argue that Scott’s travelogue articulates Europe-wide anxieties about how to memorialise Waterloo and the role of the dead in that memorialisation. In doing so, I draw on Philip Shaw’s argument that the ‘problem with peace’ is ‘its tendency to undermine stable concepts of identity’ (Shaw, 2002). In tracing the displacements, misreadings and rereadings of the dead structuring competing narratives of Waterloo, Scott exposes the fractures and tensions in European identities revealed, rather than resolved, by this battle.

Sarah Chaney (QMUL) Trigger Happy: Self-harm and emotional contagion in the 21^st century

Today, the world wide web is littered with warnings for content from self-harm and suicide to sexual abuse and racism. Yet just ten years ago the phrase ‘trigger warning’ was barely used at all. This short talk raises some questions around this notion as it pertains to self-harm in particular. On the one hand, modern concepts of self-injury depict these behaviours as private, personal acts associated with individual inner turmoil; on the other, the ‘trigger’ is embedded in a neurobiological model of conditioning, based on reflex responses to trauma. Where did the concept of the ‘trigger’ and its associated warning come from? And why and how did it become associated with an approach to self-harm based on peer contagion?

Lunch is provided and will be available from 12.45. Please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk for catering purposes. All welcome!

The seminar will take place in Room 3.16 of the Arts Two building, which is Number 35 (and coloured purple) on this campus map.

In the contemporary world, where technology, spectacle, and excess seem to eclipse nature, the individual, and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus, it is in the idea that the sublime represents a testing of limits to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. Artist and art historian Simon Morley will examine how contemporary artists and theorists explore ideas of the sublime, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny, and altered states. Providing a philosophical and cultural context for discourse around the sublime in recent art, he will survey the diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the term as it has evolved from the writings of Longinus, Burke, and Kant to present-day writers and artists like Anish Kapoor, Bill Viola and Ulafur Eliasson.

Simon Morley is an artist and Assistant Professor at Dankook University, South Korea, in the School of Fine Art. He is the author of The Sublime, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art and coauthor of The Winchester Guide to Keywords and Concepts for International Students in Art, Media and Design. You can read the intro to his book The Sublime here:

This event is happening in room 3.26 of the Bancroft Building in the Mile End Road campus of Queen Mary University of London. The Bancroft building is number 31 on this map. The talk will begin at 7.15 and end at roughly 9, after which those who want to can head to a nearby pub for further discussion.

Register interest on The London Philosophy Club website.

The second lunchtime work-in-progress seminar will take place on Wednesday 17th February. The Centre’s Jules Evans will present a paper titled ‘The decline and revival of ecstasy in Western culture’.

Abstract:

How do people get out of their heads in western culture? Ecstasy – defined as the experience of going beyond your ordinary sense of self and connecting to something bigger than you – was marginalised and pathologized in western culture from the 16th century onwards. Since the 1960s, however, it has made a comeback, through counter-culture and the rise of charismatic Christianity. This talk asks: is ecstasy always pathological, or can it be good for us and our societies? And how are contemporary psychology and psychiatry coming to appreciate ‘anomalous experiences’?

Lunch is provided and will be available from 12.45. Please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk for catering purposes. All welcome!

The Centre for the History of the Emotions is pleased to announce the program for lunchtime work-in-progress seminars over the coming semester.

Our first session will take place on Wednesday 10 February and we are delighted to welcome Aleksondra Hultquist (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions) who will give a paper titled: The Emotional Practice of the Amatory: Barker, and Haywood (abstract below). Lunch will be provided from 12.45 and the paper will begin at 1.

All welcome but for catering purposes please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk if you plan to attend. Further sessions listed below.

The Emotional Practice of the Amatory: Barker, and Haywood:

Amatory fiction supposedly has its basics established: we know its three primary authors (the “triumvirate of Wit:” Behn, Manley and Haywood), we understand its purpose (to warn women readers against seduction), its tell-tale structure (the almost serial repetition of seduction and abandonment), its purpose (to mask political discontentment through sexual tragedy).  There are full length studies on the genre (Ros Ballster’s Seductive Forms, 1992 and Toni Bowers’ Force or Fraud, 2012).  But recently attention to areas of affect theory, including the history of emotion, demonstrates that much of our information about this genre is ripe for reconsideration. Most critical evaluations of amatory discourses articulate its significance in terms of its metaphorical power to embody political struggles; Ballaster and Bowers have provided especially articulate readings exploring the romans a clef aspects of these works and the power that sexual narratives can play in political discourses.    This paper resituates amatory fiction’s critical emphasis from political discourse to a discourse of emotional education. I argue that the experience and navigation of extreme emotion and the subsequent maturity of characters after seduction or the threat of seduction are exactly the focus of these tales.

This paper argues for how the genre of amatory fiction becomes the “amatory mode,” a literary technique based on a vocabulary of the passions.   Created and regulated according to the love and sex narrative, the emotions of amatory fiction—primarily desire, love, jealousy, and revenge—enable us to classify the form more precisely than current definitions, which center on specific authors, prose structures, and a political resistance to patriarchal authority. If read as a playbook in Monique Scheer’s configuration of “emotional practice”—the mobilization, designation, communication, and regulation of emotion—the genre moves to a mode.   Haywood’s The City Jilt (1726) illustrates one of the many plots of amatory fiction where love, jealousy, and revenge become the impetus for narrative structure and a redefinition of female subjectivity.  I read this work alongside of Barker’s Love Intrigues (1713) to delineate amatory fiction’s emotional, rather than formal, structure.  This cross-genre approach clarifies the emotional practices these authors developed.  While Haywood, and Barker’s fiction often seem to accomplish different literary labor, their articulation of the passions is complementary: Barker’s “patchwork narrative” examines the detriments of not understanding or engaging in passionate emotion.  Haywood’s amatory tale examines how to survive the fallout of an emotional affair without long-term emotional or social damage.  Such analysis highlights the oxymoronic realities of sex for amatory authors.   Their heroines elevate whole-hearted emotional engagement above socially prescribed roles, and, despite getting swept away by the wrong kind of love, they ultimately achieve a kind of agency and self-knowledge that is denied to characters who rebuff their passions.

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Full Schedule:

Wednesday 10 February, 1pm (Arts Two: 3.16)

Aleksondra Hultquist (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions) The Emotional Practice of the Amatory: Barker, and Haywood

Four members of the Centre for the History of the Emotions will be taking part in next week’s Friday Late Spectacular: ‘Feeling Emotional’ at the Wellcome Collection. Co-curated by Elsa Richardson, join Elsa, Thomas Dixon, Tiffany Watt Smith and Chris Millard to explore the art and science of human emotions: the technologies we develop, the behaviours we adopt, the languages we create to make sense of ourselves and others.

More information available here