Courses

Emotion has, over the course of history, from Achilles menis (anger) to our current politicians’ hubris (pride), been one of the greatest x-factors in historic, political, and personal turn of events. Emotion is often one of the most unaccountable elements in an individual’s decisionmaking process, and, at the same time, is a culturally conditioned response, exploited for commercial and moral ends. This course seeks to define emotion—attempting to understand how it is understood historically, culturally, and philosophically—and to contrast it with the similar (but significantly different) notion of affect. What is at stake in these two terms? How does it relate to an embodied singularity, to political collectives, and to representation in general? We will look at how feelings like wonder, shame, fear, elation, pride, longing, or boredom (to name a few)—become a means to shape engagement with the world and mark turning points for understanding queer and other identities that often lack cultural and/or economic recognition. Central to this course is an exploration of the theoretical underpininnings of emotion and affect so as to guage how and why affect/emotion matters. We will look at philosophical, religious, anthropological, psychoanalytic (and other) ways of discerning and quantifying these terms in order to better understand what is at stake in relation to subjectivity and political agency. This is, of course, an impossible task in the course of a semster; however, we will attempt to cover different fields and historical periods to get a sense of how they contribute to diversity of the present moment. The range of student interests will play a part in shaping/altering the syllabus over the course of the semester.