Literature and emotion 9781138185203, 9781138185210, 9781315644639, 1138185205, 9781317289593, 1317289595

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Series Page......Page 3
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication Page......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
Series editors’ preface......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Traditions of affective poetics......Page 12
Where is literary emotion?......Page 15
Outline of the following chapters......Page 18
Note......Page 22
Chapter 1 Why emotion and literature today?......Page 23
The rise of affect study......Page 24
The purposes of literary study......Page 28
Affective science and affective poststructuralism......Page 33
Sara Ahmed on happy families and affect aliens......Page 44
Notes......Page 49
Affects and emotion episodes......Page 50
Theories of emotion......Page 59
Notes......Page 72
Chapter 4 Authors (I): Affective historicism......Page 73
Affective historicism (I): The history of emotions and cultural constructivism......Page 74
Affective historicism (II): Emotion episodes......Page 77
Note......Page 90
Expressivism and authorship......Page 91
Expressivism and interpretation......Page 103
Notes......Page 106
Chapter 6 Readers (I): Enjoying literature......Page 107
Readers’ emotions......Page 109
Mirth......Page 117
Notes......Page 128
Empathy......Page 129
Literature and empathy: Empirical study......Page 132
Literature and empathy: Theoretical analyses and pedagogical applications......Page 139
Notes......Page 142
Chapter 8 Texts (I): Storyworlds and stories......Page 143
Setting......Page 144
Characters......Page 150
Events and stories......Page 157
Notes......Page 163
Chapter 9 Texts (II): Discourse and style......Page 164
Plot......Page 166
Narration......Page 170
Style and aesthetic pleasure......Page 175
Note......Page 183
Glossary of terms......Page 187
Further reading......Page 197
Works cited......Page 199
Index......Page 212

Citation preview

Literature and Emotion

Literature and Emotion not only provides a defining overview of the field but also engages with emerging trends. Answering key questions such as ‘What is emotion?’ and ‘Why emotion and literature today?’ Patrick Colm Hogan presents a clear and accessible introduction to this exciting topic. Readers should come away from the book with a systematic understanding of recent research on and theorization of emotion, knowledge of the way affective science has impacted literary study, and a sense of how to apply that understanding and knowledge to literary works. Patrick Colm Hogan is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author of over 20 books, including Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (Routledge, 2003), and Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition (Routledge, 2014).

Literature and Contemporary Thought

Literature and Contemporary Thought is an interdisciplinary series providing new perspectives and cutting edge thought on the study of Literature and topics such as Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Digital Humanities. Each title includes chapters on: •• •• ••

why the topic is relevant, interesting and important at this moment and how it relates to contemporary debates the background of and a brief introduction to the particular area of study the book is intended to cover when this area of study became relevant to literature, how the relationship between the two areas was initially perceived and how it evolved

A glossary of key terms and annotated further reading will feature in every title. Edited by Ursula Heise and Guillermina De Ferrari, this series will be invaluable to students and academics alike as they approach the interdisciplinary study of literature. Available in this series: Literature and Animal Studies Mario Ortiz-Robles Literature and Disability Alice Hall Literature and Emotion Patrick Colm Hogan Literature and Food Studies Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth

Literature and Emotion

Patrick Colm Hogan

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Patrick Colm Hogan The right of Patrick Colm Hogan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hogan, Patrick Colm, author. Title: Literature and emotion / Patrick Colm Hogan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017029587 | ISBN 9781138185203 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138185210 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315644639 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Emotions in literature. | Psychology and literature. | Emotions (Philosophy) | Philosophy of mind in literature. Classification: LCC PN56.E6 H63 2018 | DDC 809/.93353–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017029587 ISBN: 978-1-138-18520-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-18521-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64463-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

With gratitude to Derek Stitt, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN and to Lalita

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Contents

Series editors’ preface viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Getting emotional about literature

1

1 Why emotion and literature today?

12

2 The two faces of affect study

22

3 What is emotion?

39

4 Authors (I): Affective historicism

62

5 Authors (II): Expressivism

80

6 Readers (I): Enjoying literature

96

7 Readers (II): Learning from literature

118

8 Texts (I): Storyworlds and stories

132

9 Texts (II): Discourse and style

153

Afterword: Affect aliens in the land of emotion studies

173

Glossary of terms 176 Further reading 186 Works cited 188 Index 201

Series editors’ preface

Since the turn of the millennium, literary and cultural studies have been transformed less by new, overarching theoretical paradigms than by the emergence of a multitude of innovative subfields. These emergent research areas explore the relationship between literature and new media technologies; seek to establish innovative bridges to disciplines ranging from medicine, cognitive science, and social psychology to biology and ecology; and develop new quantitative or computer-based research methodologies. In the process, they rethink crucial concepts such as affect, indigeneity, gender, and postcolonialism, and propose new perspectives on aesthetics, narrative, poetics, and visuality. Literature and Contemporary Thought seeks to capture such research at the cutting edge of literary and cultural studies. The volumes in this series explore both how new approaches are reshaping literary criticism and theory, and how research in literary and cultural studies opens out to transform other disciplines and research areas. They seek to make new literary research available, intelligible, and usable to scholars and students across academic disciplines and to the broader public beyond the university interested in innovative approaches to art and culture across different historical periods and geographical regions. Literature and Contemporary Thought highlights new kinds of scholarship in the literary and cultural humanities that are relevant and important to public debates, and seeks to translate their interdisciplinary analyses and theories into useful tools for such thought and discussion. Ursula K. Heise and Guillermina De Ferrari

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ursula Heise and Guillermina De Ferrari for approaching me about the volume and encouraging me thereafter, and for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. I am indebted to Ursula for personal and professional support as well. Thanks to Ruth Hilsdon at Routledge for her expert work. My wife, Lalita, was my only true source of sanity and calm during the very difficult period when this book was written. It would never have been written without her. Some of the ideas and arguments in the following chapters were first outlined, in a preliminary and much briefer form, in “Affect Studies and Literary Criticism,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016). I also presented some of this material in my classes at the University of Connecticut in 2016 and 2017. I am grateful to my students for their feedback and insights.

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Introduction Getting emotional about literature

As is clear from almost any review of a novel or a movie, our responses to stories and our judgments about them are suffused with emotions— ranging from enthusiasm to outrage and from grief to joy. We fear for the hero as he or she battles the villain and share the lovers’ sweet sorrow at parting. The point holds for lyric poetry as well as for narrative, as our eyes well up with tears at an elegy for a dead child or open in wonder at the beauty of language and imagery. In short, we get emotional about literature—and that is a key function of literary experience, not an occasional and incidental accompaniment.

Traditions of affective poetics The centrality of emotion to literature and literary experience has been recognized throughout literary history and across literary traditions. In traditional Indian poetics, there are two key features of literature, one semantic, the other affective. The semantic feature is dhvani, suggestion, the cloud of associations that accompany a word, image, scene, character, or other aspect of a work. The affective feature is rasa, sentiment, the emotion felt by a reader or audience member, usually an empathic form of an emotion felt (as we imagine) by a character or narrator. In this tradition, a work is defined first of all by its predominant rasa—for example, whether it is principally sorrowful or mirthful. Indeed, the most important form of dhvani is rasadhvani, the complex of semantic associations that foster an emotional response in recipients of the work (see Bharatamuni, Ānandavardhana, and Abhinavagupta for the major texts in this tradition; for a concise introduction, see Lalita Hogan, “Dhvani”). Ancient Indian poetic theory is particularly suffused with emotion. Moreover, its formulations have been influential in the modern world and outside India. For example, for over two decades, it has entered

2  Introduction into the work of literary theorists drawing on affective science (see, for example, Hogan, “Toward,” Chapter 2 of The Mind, and Oatley, Passionate 34–37). In recent years, the Indian tradition of poetic theory has also been rediscovered by writers in the other main stream of affect study, what I will call “affective poststructuralism” (see Dharwadker). But this does not mean that the Indian tradition is somehow unique. The Arabic–Persian, Muslim tradition of poetic theory has been focused particularly on ethical issues. However, it has developed these concerns specifically in relation to emotion, in particular the emotions of raḥmah and taqwā, compassion and piety (see Cantarino, Ibn Sinā, and Ibn Rushd). Indeed, in this case too, writers have explored continuities with modern cognitive and affective science (see Hogan, “Stories”). Writers in the Japanese tradition of poetics have stressed the importance of such feelings as the loneliness of sabi or the sadness of yūgen (see Miner, Odagiri, and Morrell 295 and 304). Lady Murasaki’s eleventh-century Tale of Genji places emotion at the foundation of the production of fiction when she writes that the storyteller’s own experience … not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. (501) In China, emotion has perhaps not been foregrounded to the same extent. But it remains crucially important. Liu Hsieh’s fifth-century treatise, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, is arguably the most important work of Chinese poetic theory. In that work, Liu writes that “it is the expression of the five emotions which gives us the essence of literature” (Liu 175). Specific ideas about literature and affect are found elsewhere in Chinese writings on poetics. For example, one important concept is “emotion-scene fusion,” the integration of a landscape or other surrounding with feeling (see Pan, and Samei 252). The Western tradition is no different. The centrality of emotion is probably most obvious in the Romantic movement and such immediate precursors as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant with their treatments of the sublime. The Romantics highlighted the expressive qualities of literary works, the ways in which they manifest their authors’ affect-filled experiences—in keeping with Lady Murasaki’s observations. Writers such as Friedrich Schiller explored the benefits of literature as well, how it might contribute to the training of a

Introduction 3 reader’s or audience member’s sensibility, which necessarily involves emotional response. Prior to the Romantic period, the importance of emotion is also salient in the humoral view of character found in the Renaissance (see Paster). In this account, emotional propensities were a function of bodily “humors”—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile (or choler). A dominance of blood, for example, made a person or character sanguine; too much yellow bile led to a choleric personality. In both literature and life, the results could be comic or tragic. But a stress on emotion is not confined to these obvious cases. It has been present from the outset of European poetics. Plato distrusted literature largely due to its emotional effects. Aristotle responded by emphasizing the literary function of fear and pity, and maintaining that literature does not simply arouse them, but produces their catharsis. This idea too has been taken up by modern writers, seeking to work out the details of Aristotle’s vague but suggestive formulation (see Nussbaum, Fragility 388–390 and Oatley, Passionate 173). In the first century before the Common Era, Horace articulated what is perhaps the most concise and influential summary of aesthetic norms, that literature should be sweet and useful (75). In other words, it should appeal to the emotions and at the same time provide practical instruction. In keeping with the Arabic theorists, writers in the lineage of Horace have seen the two criteria of literary excellence as closely interrelated, with the emotional appeal serving the work’s ethical purposes. For example, in the sixteenth century, Philip Sidney argued that poetry should “teach and delight,” with the delight serving “to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger” (138). Conversely, and also in keeping with the Arabic writers, theorists recognized that the emotional appeal of literary works could serve to enhance their deleterious consequences. There are both moral and political versions of the latter position. For example, some forms of Marxist ideological critique respond to the emotional appeals of works supporting dominant political views. Concerns of this sort are part of the impetus behind Bertolt Brecht’s advocacy of the “alienation effect” in didactic theater, an estrangement that provokes reflection rather than an emotional engagement that might inhibit reflection. The integration of emotional and political concerns finds a contemporary manifestation in affective poststructuralism, with its recurring view that our political responses are not so much a matter of conscious inference as unconscious feeling (see Leys). In any case, whether one distrusts emotion or seeks to make use of emotion, it is clear that affect is central to understanding and evaluating literature.

4  Introduction This centrality is just what we would expect. As Keith Oatley explains, “Emotions are important in fiction for the same reason that they are important in our everyday lives. They signal changes to the world in which we are engaged. They are the bases of our values” (Passionate 126). Oatley’s observations converge with the claims of writers from Sidney to the affective poststructuralists, for he affirms that the two components of Horace’s dictum are inseparably bound up with one another—though, in comparison with some writers, he would draw more modest conclusions from that relation. Oatley and the affective poststructuralists are not alone in this view. In keeping with this general point, Julien Deonna writes that “reason is often cited as the source of our norms and values”; however, “it is emotions that are thought by most psychologists and philosophers to be at the root of both phenomena” (284).

Where is literary emotion? Despite this history, emotion received relatively little attention in much of the criticism and theory that dominated Western universities in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This began to change toward the end of the century, and there has been a flowering of work on emotion and literature in the past 15 years—inspired in part by a slightly earlier flowering of work on emotion in cognitive science and related disciplines. The purpose of this book is to present, clarify, systematize, illustrate, and extend some of the valuable work from that recent flowering of emotion research and affective criticism. As already noted, some of that recent work has drawn on the history of affective poetics in different traditions. In the following chapters, I will not be able to examine these traditions. There is, after all, more than enough contemporary work to fill the pages of a short book. However, before going on, it is valuable to revisit some of these theories briefly in order to isolate some of the most important targets of affective analysis. Emotion is associated with different features of literary works and literary experiences. The traditions to which we have referred provide us with suggestions as to just where literary emotion is to be found. They therefore point us toward some of the topics that should be treated in a book on emotion and literature. In other words, noting the various concerns articulated in these traditions may provide us with a useful grid for setting out the alternatives in contemporary affective literary study.

Introduction 5 First, a number of these theorists show an orientation toward the recipient of the work, stressing either his or her enjoyment or the work’s effects on character. This is roughly a division between the “sweet” and “useful” aspects of recipient experience. Rasa theory is principally a matter of enjoyment. Aristotle’s account of pity and fear is largely of the first sort as well, though the idea of catharsis may suggest beneficial, longer-term effects. The training of sensibility found in Schiller and some other Romantic writers is more clearly of the second sort. Some other writers emphasize authorial expression, the articulation of emotional experience by a writer. This is most obvious in such Romantics as William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley. But a version of it is found in Lady Murasaki as well. Still other writers point toward aspects of the storyworld, the imaginative universe created by the narrative. Such writers may focus on characters—with their “humors” or other psychological inclinations. Alternatively, they may address the scene or context, as we find in the idea of emotion-scene fusion and in some treatments of sabi. Finally, there is attention to narrative structure—both story, which is to say, the events themselves, and discourse, which is to say, how those events are presented (e.g., when information is given). The Sanskrit narrative theorists focused principally on story. Though the distinction is not entirely clear in Aristotle, it may be argued that discourse emotion (e.g., in the timing of event information to foster fear or pity) is more important in his case. Readers familiar with narratology (the study of narrative) will recognize the main components of narratological analysis in these loci of literary emotion. In keeping with this, we may extend and systematize this list by reference to narratology. The standard organization of narrative analysis may be represented in a simple diagram as follows (with parallel components marked by capitals, boldface, and italics): REAL AUTHOR (implied author [narrator {plot and verbalization } narratee] implied reader) REAL READER

6  Introduction Since we will be treating these components in the following chapters, this is not the place to explain them in detail. However, some simple definitions are in order. The real author and real reader are just what they appear to be— actual, historical, and biographical persons with all their individual idiosyncrasies. Of course, real people are the only vehicles for real emotion. However, we imagine emotions elsewhere and respond emotionally to such imaginations. Such imagination, or “simulation,” as it is called in cognitive science, underlies and animates the remaining components. The implied author and implied reader are complex and widely debated constructs. The simplest way of understanding the implied author is as a set of norms for the work. The implied author is related to the real author, but need not be consistent with the real author. For example, a politician may not care about minority rights but might give a speech supporting minority rights in order to appeal to a particular constituency. The implied author of such a speech supports minority rights even though the actual author does not. Put differently, the difference between the real author and the implied author allows for insincerity. The implied reader is the reader anticipated by the implied author. For example, a particular work might make reference to “September 11” without further elaboration. The implied reader for the work would be someone who would identify the historical events of that date in 2001. The narrator is the speaker (or editor or related mediator) of the plot within the fiction. The narrator is differentiated from the implied author in that he or she may be “unreliable,” thus misleading in information or judgment (see Phelan, “Rhetoric/Ethics”). In other words, the relation of the implied author and the narrator may be one of ironic distance. The narratee is the addressee of the narrator. The plot is the selection and organization of information from the storyworld and story—what is related and when it is related—while the verbalization is the precise linguistic representation of that information. “Storyworld” is used in a variety of ways. Here and below, I use it to refer to enduring features of character and scene in which causal sequences of events take place. Those causal sequences constitute the story. The key feature of this analysis for our purposes is that emotional concerns enter at every level. For example, we have already noted the importance of emotional expression for real authors, as well as enjoyment and enduring sensibility for real readers. Implied authors are as significant for their emotional attitudes toward characters and events as for the information they suggest. No less clearly, implied readers are to a great extent defined by expected emotional response (e.g., in the

Introduction 7 example given above, the implied reader’s attitude toward the events of September 11 is probably at least as important as accurate knowledge of those events). Note that the implied reader is significant even for works that fail with respect to their real readership. For example, the anti-marijuana film, Reefer Madness, was evidently made to frighten viewers; this is a key part of its implied audience, even if most actual viewers find it more comic than terrifying. Narration raises issues of trust, the emotional side of our judgments about reliability. Plot entails suspense, which is a partial function of when information is presented, and so on.

Outline of the following chapters There are different ways in which one could divide and organize possible foci for affective analysis of literature. However, a narratological division seems particularly well justified, both by a range of traditions and by current theoretical principles. In other words, it is resonant cross-culturally and systematic. For these reasons, it promises to be a useful way of organizing a study of affect and literature toward the goals of clarifying and extending research in that field. I will not be able to cover all the preceding components in equal detail. Nonetheless, these components will provide the general basis for the book’s structure in Chapters 4 through 9. There are, in addition, some preliminary issues, treated in Chapters 1 through 3. These chapters examine theoretical and related backgrounds, which are important for understanding and contextualizing—and, to some extent, qualifying—what follows. Specifically, the first chapter treats the question, “Why Emotion and Literature Today?” It briefly outlines some of the forces, both intellectual and institutional, behind the recent rise of affect study. From here, it goes on to consider the purposes of literary study in order to indicate more clearly just what affective literary research might hope to accomplish. For example, the chapter stresses that literary study may be oriented toward literature or toward the world. As such, the purposes of affective literary study may go in either direction as well; it may help us to understand individual literary works more fully, but it might equally contribute to our understanding of the human mind. The second chapter differentiates two main strands in affect study. These are sometimes called “affective science” and “affect theory.” However, affective science is certainly theoretical and the phrase “affect theory” is sometimes used to include affective science. In these ways, the phrase “affect theory” is problematic. I have therefore opted

8  Introduction for dividing the field slightly differently, placing the division between affective science and what I call “affective poststructuralism,” an approach to emotion that draws prominently on poststructuralist writings by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan (sometimes negatively), and others. This is not an absolute dichotomy. There are figures who write in both traditions. Indeed, affective poststructuralists regularly make some (limited and selective) use of affective science. Nonetheless, there is a broad tendency toward a division of this sort. The chapter begins by setting out some of the main differences between these orientations. It then turns to a concrete example—Sara Ahmed’s treatment of happiness and “affect aliens” (people whose emotional responses are not what they “should” be, according to social norms). This second section explicates Ahmed’s ideas, seeking to extend them by means of integration with affective science, an integration which of course expands affective science in the process. The second chapter focuses more on affective poststructuralism because the rest of the book is devoted principally to affective science. This is due to the greater clarity, empirical support, and coherence of affective science. However, affective poststructuralism is often concerned with political issues and sensitive to social concerns that have been largely absent from mainstream affective science. The affective poststructuralist engagement with political critique will inflect the following analyses, including my selection of affective science researchers to discuss in greater detail. The third chapter outlines some basic principles of affective science. It does this in two sections. The first section begins by explaining the categories of affect, focusing on emotion and specifically on emotion episodes. Emotion episodes comprise a number of recurring features, which it is important to distinguish for both theoretical and practical reasons. The second section turns to some of the theories of emotion that are current in affective science. These include emotion systems theories, which posit distinct, pre-dedicated emotion systems (such as fear, anger, and happiness), more or less in keeping with commonsense views of emotion. They also include dimensional theories, which see emotion as defined by a single set of features with variables (e.g., degree of pleasantness and degree of arousal). In the latter account, ordinary language emotion categories are loose ways of referring to complexes of features with particular settings of the variables (e.g., feeling peaceful and feeling happy might involve the same degree of pleasantness, but the latter would be higher in arousal). The chapter illustrates many of these points by reference to Romeo and Juliet.

Introduction 9 The following chapters turn to particular loci of emotion in l­ iterature. Specifically, the fourth and fifth chapters examine authors. The former treats authors and their societies, taking up affective historicism, which views emotion as socially malleable and thus examines emotion in its historical context. The fifth chapter turns from society to the individual, considering expressivism, the view that authors create out of their own experience and specifically out of their own emotional responses to that experience. Both chapters begin with theoretical outlines of just what is involved in the topic—just how emotion might undergo historical change and just what it means for an author to express his or her emotions in a work of art. In both instances, we will consider the topic in relation to the affective architecture developed in Chapter 3. In the case of historicism, the analysis draws on a range of writers, such as Gail Kern Paster, among others. In the case of expressivism, our theoretical discussion will rely particularly on the work of Jenefer Robinson, with illustrative instances taken up from Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare. Robinson argues that expressivism should be linked with the implied author—a surprising connection that extends the emotional scope of implied authorship beyond its more obvious role in defining sincerity. Both chapters include interpretive application of the theories to Romeo and Juliet. Chapters 6 and 7 turn us from authors to readers. The former considers the enjoyment of literature (the Horatian “sweet”), while the latter takes up “Learning from literature” (the Horatian “useful”). Chapter 6 begins with some comments on real and implied readers. The first section of the chapter then outlines different types of emotion and affective response as they bear on implied (and real) readers. This section draws particularly on the work of Carl Plantinga. The following section turns to the emotion of mirth, stressing Noël Carroll’s theory of humor. This chapter draws principally on film theory. This is because work in film studies has treated spectatorship (the cinematic correlate of readership) extensively. Moreover, much of this work has drawn on cognitive and affective science in particularly insightful ways. Again, Chapter 7 is continuous with Chapter 6. The first section takes up the topic of empathy. Remaining sections consider the empathic implications of literature, addressing both empirical and theoretical considerations, as well as real and implied readers. In conclusion, the chapter turns briefly to Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, a novel treating the experience of a transgender protagonist, suggesting how one might teach the novel in order to inspire empathic response on the part of students.1

10  Introduction The eighth and ninth chapters take us to texts and the simulations they foster. The eighth chapter considers storyworlds (roughly, settings and characters) and stories (sequences of events with their causal relations). It begins with settings, drawing in part on narratological treatments and in part on ecocritical approaches. The second section takes up characters, considering such issues as how emotion bears on character typology. The final section explores the sequences of events that constitute stories. In The Mind and Its Stories and Affective Narratology, I have argued that a small number of story sequences recur with greater or lesser prominence across unrelated literary traditions. For our purposes, the crucial point about these structures is that they may be explained down to many details by reference to wellestablished principles of affective science. In each case, I will focus on Romeo and Juliet for illustrations. The ninth chapter turns to narrative discourse, addressing the remaining components of our narratological analysis—plot, narration, and style. Plot is crucial for several emotions that feature prominently in our response to literature, most obviously interest, a topic discussed insightfully by Ed Tan, and suspense. There are, however, further emotions involved in emplotment—such as surprise and curiosity, discussed by Meir Sternberg, as well as relief, disappointment, and others. The second section of this chapter turns to narration, addressing the emotions that bear on narrators (and touching briefly on narratees). As with characters, narrator-relevant emotions include both those of the narrator himself or herself and those of readers regarding the narrator. However, the precise emotions at issue are not identical. For example, our first and fundamental emotional relation to the narrator is one of trust or distrust. Moreover, as David Bordwell has stressed, narrators differ in their degree of personification (or personalization; see Margolin, “Character” 56). This necessarily impacts our emotional relation to them. The final section of this chapter considers style, specifically in relation to aesthetic pleasure. Style-based emotions are not confined to aesthetic pleasure. Nor is aesthetic pleasure confined to style. However, the two topics are closely related in our experience and thus aptly treated together. In connection with this, the section surveys some recent research in affective and cognitive science that provides clues as to the complex information processing and emotional factors that foster our feeling of beauty. This treatment of narrative discourse takes us to the last of our narratological components, and thus to the end of the book—almost. In an Afterword, I comment very briefly on some of the limits of affective science and urge the integration of certain practices from affective

Introduction 11 poststructuralism. Within the humanities, affect study, particularly affective science, seems to be heading toward greater incorporation of experimental neuroscience into literary study. That is all well and good as long as one recognizes that functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans are not transparent pictures of some self-evident truth, but ambiguous pieces of data embedded in social institutions pervaded by unequal relations of power that are often non-­meritocratic and ­distorted by social ideologies. The Afterword is followed by a glossary and a short, annotated list of suggestions for further reading. The glossary includes brief definitions of some key terms from affect studies, principally affective science. The definitions in the glossary are not meant to substitute for the fuller discussions of ideas in the course of the book. However, they should serve to help orient readers, given the many technical concepts introduced in the following pages.

Note 1 For readers unfamiliar with Binnie’s novel, it focuses first of all on a transgender woman, Maria, who is transitioning from her male birth sex. She lives as a woman, but cannot afford vaginoplasty. At the beginning of the novel, she has a girlfriend and a job. She breaks up with the girlfriend and loses her job, then takes her ex-girlfriend’s car, purchases heroin, and goes on a road trip. The last part of the novel brings her to Nevada, where she meets James, who has sexual fantasies of becoming a woman. Recapitulating medical and political debates on the topic, James and Maria disagree about what constitutes and gives rise to transgenderism. In the end, James steals heroin from Maria and leaves to meet his girlfriend. The unresolved conclusion does not tell us what happens to either character.

1 Why emotion and literature today?

As indicated in the introduction, the purposes of the present book extend ideally to furthering research programs in emotion and literature. The following chapters will be devoted principally to outlining some of the main areas in which these research programs have been developing. Before turning to these topics, however, it is valuable to indicate briefly why it is important to study emotion and literature today. In this chapter, I first note some of the sources for the rise of affect study. These sources suggest some reasons for viewing it as valuable and some reasons for viewing it with caution. I take this dual approach because the provenance of affect study gives it a degree of initial prestige. Again, affect study comprises both affective science and affective poststructuralism. The former derives its status from association with science generally and neuroscience in particular. The latter shares the esteem in which Grand Theory—the work of Derrida, Foucault, and others—is often held in the academy. In both cases, the bias associated with prestige means that it is important to recognize the limits of affect study, while also noting its general value and timeliness. The situation with literary study—whether affective or not—is somewhat different. Perhaps because we live in an advanced capitalist society, social value often seems to be a function of a narrowly defined productivity, specifically productivity that enhances material wealth. The value of science in producing wealth is obvious. However, the literal payoff of literary study is not clear, and thus its value in any sense is called into question. Put somewhat crudely, the worth of affective science is likely to be assumed by all parties. But the worth of literary study may not be so readily accepted, at least by people who are not literary critics. Even in a thoroughly capitalist society, the scope of evaluation is somewhat broadened by appeals to morality. Whether liberal or conservative, writers and readers tend to recognize a role for what

Why emotion and literature today? 13 literature teaches us ethically. In universities, this moral role is particularly emphasized as a sort of counterforce to the identification of value with market value or wealth productivity. It is at least part of the reason that Grand Theory is esteemed. For example, deconstruction seems more broadly prized as a tool for challenging the “binaries” (i.e., the hierarchized oppositions) of patriarchy or of heterosexism than as a theory of the way language actually works. Ethical evaluation is of course an important part of judging literary study. There are, however, problems with this tendency. Dominant views of political value seem often to be derived post facto, added to the use of a theory rather than motivating and justifying that use initially. In other words, it is often not entirely clear that a given theory or form of literary study does indeed have liberating consequences, in the sense of actually empowering otherwise disenfranchised people. Moreover, even when there are moral consequences, this focus is overly restrictive, constraining literary study to a sort of political campaign. For these reasons, I have presented a rather fuller treatment of the purposes of literary study. Not all the purposes treated below will make an appearance in the following chapters. It is nonetheless helpful to be aware of their extent and diversity, in part not to reduce literary study to a single function and in part to point toward some ways in which the study of emotion and literature might be productively advanced in the future.

The rise of affect study Writing early in the current millennium, Robert Emmons noted that “[o]ver the past quarter century, unprecedented progress has been made in understanding the biological, psychological, and social bases of human emotions” (“Psychology” 3). Emmons is speaking principally of research contributing to affective science. The observation is uncontroversial within academic and empirical psychology (including cognitive science, social psychology, and other sub-fields). There has been a similar development in affective poststructuralism. The bearing of all this on literature is no doubt obvious. But it is worth underscoring that, as Kringelbach and Phillips put it in their book treating neuroscience and emotion, “[f]or centuries, the real experts on emotions have been novelists, poets, artists, and creators of popular entertainment, but not generally scientists” (8). In other words, the explicit formulations of scientists are only now catching up with the implicit representations (and sometimes articulated generalizations) of literature and the arts.

14  Why emotion and literature today? The fact that affect study has seen enormous growth in recent decades is of course reason enough to devote attention to the topic, whether in connection with literature or independently. However, it is helpful to gain some sense of why this growth has occurred. These reasons may help sensitize us to both the likely strengths and the probable limitations of affect study in its current forms. Recently, I was visiting another university where a class was reading some of my work on emotion and literature. I was asked to outline how I arrived at emotion study. In thinking about my personal trajectory, I isolated four main factors that contributed significantly to this outcome. I would like to take these personal reflections as a starting point, as I believe that their broad structure is generalizable. First, I found that a great deal of what led me to affect study was a matter of chance—whom I happened to meet, what books I happened to come upon (e.g., purchased by my wife), and the like. There is no doubt a great deal of randomness in the development of any research program, including those constituting affect study. For example, the prominence of particular writers in affective poststructuralism probably resulted in part from the accidents that formed the personal tastes of individual writers on affect theory, the preferences of editors at presses publishing their books, and so on. This sort of contingency is important because we tend to see the path of research programs as somehow necessary, as inevitable developments. In fact, things could have been very different. Recognizing this might help to foster the sort of questioning attitude that is so important to intellectual progress, but that is often replaced by intellectual conformism. Of course, not everything was accidental. To some extent, my interests extended back to emotional propensities that had their roots in childhood, often connected with attachment relations. Like accidents, such motivational inclinations are contingent; they are not generalizable in their particularity. Accidents and dispositions contributed to my work in affective science and to Sara Ahmed’s work in affective poststructuralism, and so on for all the writers we will be discussing— and all their readers. The accidents and dispositions differ individually, making it difficult to say anything productive about accidents or dispositions in general. However, one point about dispositions is clear. We all have them, and they crucially involve emotions. That makes our concern with emotions both idiosyncratic and in some respects inevitable. Put simply, we care about feelings. The remaining factors too are in part general and in part individually variable. The first is a general principle that broad social trends have a selection function on our interests and orientations. When I

Why emotion and literature today? 15 wrote on law and literature, that work was largely ignored by the profession. When I wrote on affective science and literature, that work got some attention, leading to invitations for further writing. This encouraged me to continue working in the latter area rather than the former one. Put in economic terms, there was a market for one sort of work, but not for the other. There are at least two ways in which market factors are likely to affect academic research, whether in affect studies or elsewhere. The first is in selecting works for which there is already a market. Derrida, Foucault, and to a lesser extent Lacan were significant market forces at the time when affect theory arose in literary study. As affective science developed, neuroscience was and remains highly saleable among academics and even the general public. For these reasons, affect theory books relying on Derrida and Foucault, written in a poststructuralist idiom, were and are more likely to be pursued by editors at presses, recommended by referees, and so on. The same holds for affective science books that draw on neuroscience and illustrate their claims with images drawn from fMRI scans. The point here is simply that a certain degree of intellectual conformity is likely to be part of the intellectual trajectory of theory development. The fact that Derrida turns up in affect theory does not necessarily indicate that Derrida’s work is best suited to affect theory. It may simply suggest that Derridaean thought was prominent in the market that affect theory entered. The second market factor is the apparent opposite. The entire structure of the academy—with its tenure and promotion systems, merit increments for salary, and so on—fosters a need for continual production of publications. Worse still, the rhetoric surrounding those publications seems to push inexorably toward claims that the new work is path-breaking, radical, even revolutionary. For example, in the course of my career, I have seen claims for works go from assertions that a given analysis “develops” or “extends” previous work, to “challenges” received opinion, to “destabilizes” standard views—or even destabilizes the very social foundations of those standard views. In this context, market innovation is necessary. To some extent, affect study was inevitable not only for psychological reasons, but for marketing reasons. It gave graduate students and faculty members a new set of topics to examine and publish on. I say this is the “apparent” opposite of the first market factor because, even when new work differs from prior work in topic, it is often continuous with that prior work in method. The ideas and idioms of Derrida and Foucault follow researchers into affective poststructuralism; fMRI scans illustrate affective science just as they illustrate studies of perception.

16  Why emotion and literature today? Having noted these skepticism-inducing factors, however, it is important to go on to the fourth contributor, which is what gives intellectual work its integrity. To some extent, I felt my work on emotion was the result of an attempt to give the most illuminating description and the most plausible explanation to the topic I was studying. For example, due to accidents of reading (related to an early interest in different cultures), I found that particular sequences of story structures recurred in many genetically and geographically distinct literary traditions (i.e., traditions that did not have a common origin or much interaction). When I sought to explain these patterns, the operation of emotion systems seemed to offer the best account—the account that explained the most data most elegantly and rigorously. This point too is generalizable. Affective scientists do not worship fMRI scans; they analyze them in relation to behavioral, verbal, and other data, articulating the best explanations they are able to formulate. Those explanations are the “best” of those that occur to the researcher, and what occurs to the researcher is in part a matter of accident. Moreover, what explanations get published and disseminated is to some degree a function of disciplinary doctrine at the time (see Hogan, “Teaching” and references therein). Research programs— in affect study or elsewhere—are flawed. But they are not given up wholly to chance and market factors. There are insightful, hardworking, thoughtful people engaged in research programs. They think through issues and data in an attempt to understand them; they criticize and develop one another’s ideas and insights; they test hypotheses and even at times report their own failures. The point is perhaps obvious in the case of affective science. But it holds for affective poststructuralism as well. Writers of that orientation are often deeply concerned with political and ethical issues. Indeed, their principal concern is often one of producing progressive political change. Faced with the apparent failure of left-wing analyses of and responses to sexism, racism, homophobia, imperialism, for example, they sought new means of understanding and opposing these social trends. The study of affect seemed to offer just such possibilities. It is important to note that the development of research programs should not be understood too narrowly. They are not simply a matter of answering specific research questions (such as, “What accounts best for cross-cultural patterns in story structure?”). First, there are common modes of reasoning or types of explanation that extend across particular research agendas. These include common models for formulating descriptive and explanatory principles. Second, there are

Why emotion and literature today? 17 broad tendencies in research orientation, larger types of questions that are made the topic of research. In the early days of cognitive science, the most prominent model for the human mind was the computer. Computers usefully analogize the structures and operations of information storage and processing. However, they are not well-suited to foster an interest in or attention to emotions. The shift away from a computer model thus contributed to “the affective turn,” as it is sometimes called. That shift was itself related to technological developments that allowed greater access to brain operation. Such technological developments alter the data available for research programs and are another source of alterations in research tendencies. As to research topics, there is a striking tendency in intellectual history to shift between a focus on structures and a focus on events or actions. This division has been influentially treated by Paul Ricoeur in the context of structuralism and phenomenology. In keeping with this tendency, another broad shift in the orientation of cognitive science in recent years is that from a nearly exclusive emphasis on structure to a greater emphasis on events. Of course, work on structures continues, but the growing significance of event-based analysis is shown by the increased importance of, for example, “situated cognition” theory. (Situated cognition theory stresses the degree to which cognition is inseparable from the actual, particular conditions of its exercise [see Robbins and Aydede, “Short”].) As soon as we ask about events and actions (rather than latent capacities), our attention is likely to be turned toward motivation systems, thus emotion. In this way, the broader intellectual atmosphere, which has involved greater attention to events and actions, has also fostered (and in turn been fostered by) correlated attention to emotion. In short, there are many reasons for the recent rise of affect studies. Some of these give us good intellectual reasons for tentatively accepting its various arguments and conclusions. Others caution us to approach these arguments and conclusions with a degree of skepticism. In both cases, they urge us to view affect study as a series of partially complementary and partially contradictory research programs that are highly fallible, but probably the best means currently available for understanding the complex and consequential topic of emotion.

The purposes of literary study Having outlined some of the reasons for the rise of emotion study, we may now turn to some of the purposes of literary study. This may

18  Why emotion and literature today? initially seem unnecessary—don’t we all know why we study literature? In fact, I suspect that the range of functions served by literary study is often underestimated. I do not mean to say that I am going to uncover heretofore unknown benefits of research into fiction. However, when the aims of criticism are enumerated, the list is usually a very abbreviated one, and one with little attention to emotion. We might begin by drawing two initial, overarching divisions. First, there is the obvious distinction between understanding and evaluation, which is to say, purposes that concern description and explanation, on the one hand, and those that concern norms, on the other hand. Second, there is the less self-evident distinction between literature-oriented and world-oriented study. This division reflects the fact that we might examine literary works to understand more about literature or that we might examine literary works to understand more about some aspect of the world outside literature. For example, we might consider emotion in a literary work to achieve greater insight into the motives of characters in that work, but we might equally set our sights on using the work to learn something about emotion in real life. Within descriptive, literature-oriented approaches, we may distinguish two kinds of scope: particular and general. Particularist forms of study seek to understand or respond to individuality—for example, the specificity of a given novel—commonly through interpretation. The most obvious forms of such particularist study concern the literary work. However, we might have particularist interest in the author or individual readers. For example, Norman Holland’s work on identity (e.g., in Five Readers Reading) in part concerns the particularity of readers. Turning to generalization, we find the broad, pattern-defined categories that subsume particular works, authors, and so on, including genres (for texts) and movements (for authors). Part of such generalization is the formulation of theories. Theoretical reflection expands our descriptive understanding to explanatory principles. Though theory itself is generalizing, it may concern either particular or general topics. Thus theory of interpretation treats particularity, whereas narratology treats such generalizations as genre. Within normative, literature-oriented purposes, we may begin by distinguishing aesthetic and ethical–political concerns. Aesthetic response is particular and concerns our reaction to a literary work as an object of aesthetic pleasure, not only whether we find it beautiful or sublime (or ugly or banal), but also whether we find it exciting or boring, suspenseful, romantic, or whatever. The normative study of literature aimed at aesthetic response has as its main concern the cultivation of (aesthetic) sensitivity—for example, our ability to respond

Why emotion and literature today? 19 to the beauties of Woolf’s language or to infelicities of narrative voice in the writings of a less skilled (or less diligent) author. Ethical–political response is similar. Here, too, the main particularistic concern is the reader’s reception of literary works, though in this case the focus is on the ethical and/or political implications of that reception. We may refer to the cultivation of ethical–political emotion (integrated with information processing) as the training of (ethicalpolitical) sensibility. Training of sensibility is often bound up with the development of empathy (as discussed in Chapter 7). One form of ethical–political training of sensibility comes with the practice of “reading as”—for example, reading as a woman (see, for example, Culler, On Deconstruction). In reading as, one self-consciously seeks to respond to a work from the perspective of a person in a particular group, with that group identification made salient. The two forms of evaluation—aesthetic and ethical–political—do not only address particular cases, but also seek to articulate general principles that may guide rational debate regarding aesthetic or ­ethical–political response. This is aesthetic or ethical–political (literary) theory. At the risk of complicating matters excessively, it seems important to note that theories of aesthetic or ethical–political response may themselves be normative or non-normative. If normative, they seek to articulate criteria for evaluation. If non-normative, they set out to describe and explain response. For example, an aesthetic theory may seek to articulate the principles that govern feelings of beauty and sublimity without taking any stand on the issue of which of two contradictory responses is right. Similarly, a non-normative ethical–political theory might seek to explain why people tend to identify with some categories rather than others (e.g., racial categories rather than [crossracial] class categories), without presenting reasons for preferring one type of identification over others. On the whole, affective poststructuralism is more political and politically engaged than affective science. This is principally a matter of normative theory. Affective poststructuralists commonly set out to support particular political positions. In consequence, their theoretical claims tend to be normative. Though this certainly occurs with affective scientists, it is much less common. In contrast, affective scientists seem much more likely to explore normative responses in descriptive theories. Put simply, it appears that affective poststructuralists are often more interested in training sensibility (e.g., to politically empower sexual or racial minorities). In contrast, affective scientists are more likely to engage in systematic research leading to the articulation and explanation of how aesthetic or ethical–political response operates.

20  Why emotion and literature today? Probably the best examples of research on ethical–political response do not concern our reaction to literary works (e.g., our empathy with literary characters), but our reactions to the world. For example, affective scientists have been very interested in the ways that reading literature might contribute to the development of real-world empathic accuracy, as we will discuss in Chapter 7. Similarly, affective poststructuralists tend to be engaged by literary response only to the extent that it reflects or otherwise helps us to understand and respond to non-fictional ethical and political issues. This obviously turns us from literature-oriented literary study to world-oriented literary study. Here, too, we may draw a broad distinction between descriptive and normative concerns. Since we have just considered normative topics in literatureoriented study, we might consider the normative area first in this case. Normative, world-oriented literary study too may be divided into the aesthetic and the ethical–political. Here again we find the fostering of aesthetic sensitivity and the cultivation of ethical–political sensibility. However, in this case, the sensitivity and sensibility are aimed not at the literary work, but at the world. Aesthetically, the point is not to foster responsiveness to (say) the beauties of Woolf’s language, but to experiences of ordinary life—perhaps through “defamiliarizing” those aspects of ordinary life to which we are habituated (as the Russian formalists would put it; see Shklovsky 741). Ethically and politically, the aim is not to cultivate, say, empathy with characters who are outgroup members (as when a man reads as a woman). It is, rather, to cultivate empathy with outgroup members in the real world and even to act on that empathic response in, for example, supporting anti-discrimination legislation. Here, theoretical reflection operates in much the same way as already discussed, but with an expansion of the target from literature to the real world. Again, the most obvious and significant examples of descriptive theory in this area come from studies in affective and cognitive science, such as research on how literary study enhances general empathic accuracy. In contrast, outlining a program for political engagement and fostering such engagement are more characteristic of affective poststructuralism. The descriptive, world-oriented purposes of literary study may be organized into the same categories as descriptive purposes for literature-oriented literary study—particular and general. The particular focus might involve altering one’s understanding of and response to the author as a biographical individual, the society in which the work was produced, or the individual reader—prominently including oneself—as a biographical individual. But the final goal is different in the world-oriented case. In literature-oriented particular study, one might

Why emotion and literature today? 21 research Shakespeare’s England in order to understand Macbeth. In world-oriented particular study, one might examine Macbeth in order to understand Shakespeare’s England. Perhaps even more strikingly, critics and theorists such as Norman Holland have explored the ways in which individual literary response can be a fruitful means of learning about oneself (see Holland and Schwartz). As to the treatment of generality, we may study literature in order to learn something about the human mind, social relations, language, or other worldly phenomena. Most important for our purposes, we may not only study affective science or affective poststructuralism in order to make more sense of literary works and respond to them more fully or more appropriately. We may also study literature in order to learn something about emotion. For example, the cross-cultural wealth of romantic stories almost certainly has things to teach us about the nature and operation of romantic love. Even if it is highly idealized, that idealization itself may be revealing; successful and enduring romantic stories (such as Romeo and Juliet) may tell us about the aspirations of romantic love in a way that real, human relations—with their flaws and contingencies—may not. In sum, there are many reasons to study literature, many different purposes that might be fulfilled by interpretation of literary works, theorization about literary patterns and norms, or the application of literature to life. Most if not all of these reasons involve not only information processing but emotion as well. As such, it should be clear that literary study is a rich field for work treating emotion. The present time seems especially propitious for the study of literature and emotion due to the flowering of emotion research and theorization in recent years. That flowering has resulted from the convergence of a number of factors. Some factors indicate that emotion study has made great intellectual advances in recent decades. Others, however, are not purely intellectual and indicate that—here as in any form of research—caution is in order. Enthusiasm for the study of emotion is not misplaced. But it should be tempered by skepticism. That mingling of enthusiasm with skepticism is well represented by the idea of theories and interpretations as tentative conclusions within ongoing and partially competing research programs. The study of literature and emotion includes many promising research programs today. As already noted, the aim of the following chapters is not to make a final statement on the nature of literature and emotion, but to contribute constructively to such programs.

2 The two faces of affect study

Affective science and affective poststructuralism The phrases “affect studies” and “affect theory” are commonly used to refer to a range of theories and overarching orientations to theorization that share a focal concern with emotion, motivation, or related phenomena. Despite this shared concern, the theories and orientations in question are often very different. Simplifying somewhat, we may organize the theories into two broad orientations, which is to say, two sets of general explanatory presuppositions and social goals that guide the formulation of specific theories. We may refer to these as “affective poststructuralism” and (following common practice) “affective science.” As the name indicates, the former orientation derives from poststructuralism—prominently including the discourse analysis associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction—often in combination with elements drawn from psychoanalytic tradition. Foucaultian discourse analysis critically examines the ways in which disciplines are organized in their theorizations and their institutional structures and practices. It considers such issues as who is authorized to speak or write and with what degree of authority, what sets of terms and what sorts of hypothesis such a speaker or writer may articulate, what consequences that speech or writing may have, and how those consequences are enforced institutionally. For example, in psychiatry, what is the authority of a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, a nurse practitioner; what sorts of diagnosis and treatment are acceptable; what legal and other mechanisms operate to control the actions of the people involved (e.g., their access to pharmaceuticals)? In keeping with this aspect of Foucault’s work, affective poststructuralism has developed in part out of cultural studies, with concern for political analysis and social activism that goes beyond the traditional Marxist

The two faces of affect study 23 stress on economy. In connection with these points, Foucaultian discourse analysts tend to adopt a skeptical attitude toward the truth claims of the disciplines they are studying. All this is in principle compatible with empirically based research on emotion, as practiced in affective science. Writers in affective science seem much less critical of disciplinary biases than they might be; in consequence, Foucaultian skepticism is often a salutary counterforce to the enthusiasm of literary theorists and critics influenced by affective science. On the other hand, Foucaultian approaches can also lead authors to be rather too impervious to the value of scientific inquiry and overly committed to historicism, so that they fail to recognize or accept universal patterns, which are centrally important to scientific inquiry. (A good example of these issues may be seen in the discussions printed in Chomsky and Foucault.1) Deconstruction begins with Derrida’s account of meaning and perception. By this account, there is no full semantic or perceptual presence. In our usual, “logocentric” way of thinking, we believe (or tacitly assume) that such presence establishes the organization and normative principles for cognition, language, and experience. Deconstruction works to expose the inconsistencies of logocentrism and its “metaphysics of presence.” Crucially, Derrida argues that there is always already some displacement of meaning or experience. For example, the meaning of any given term is not some immediate plenitude, but a difference from other terms and an endless series of deferrals to what follows. It is not stably centered, but unstably disseminative. If I say, “the cat,” the meaning of “cat” is defined by its difference from “kitten,” “dog,” and other terms. It is also part of a series that may radically alter that meaning (e.g., if the next word is “burglar”). Though Derrida developed many other ideas in the course of his career, this critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence has remained central, at least to a great deal of the work he inspired. Given the options offered by Derrida, his conclusion is correct. If one must choose between there being or not being full, transcendent plenitude of presence, then one has to go with not being. But in fact these are not the only choices. Indeed, it seems that Derrida’s principles cannot generate any account of meaning, not even a differential and deferred meaning. (Noting that gerb is opposed to torgo does not give either term a meaning.) Similar points may be made about the deconstruction of binaries. Derrida follows structuralist precursors in seeing discourse as organized into a versus b oppositions, such that the latter term is understood as secondary to and derivative of the former term. Deconstructive practices claim to reveal that the putatively

24  The two faces of affect study definitive term in effect presupposes the putatively derivative term, and thus that the hierarchy cannot be maintained, centrally for reasons of difference and deferral. But the organization of discourse into binary oppositions is overly simple, and the claims of hierarchization are typically not a matter of meaning anyway. For example, we do not value cooperation over violence because we (mistakenly) think that the meaning of violence is secondary to and derivative of the meaning of cooperation.2 Nonetheless, the semantic overturning of binaries— like the related idea that difference and deferral are definitive of meaning—remains central to much contemporary literary theory, including much poststructuralist work on emotion. As to psychoanalysis, I say that affective poststructuralism draws on “psychoanalytic tradition,” rather than “psychoanalysis,” because affect theorists frequently base their psychological descriptions and explanations on critiques of mainstream psychoanalysis—whether that of Jacques Lacan or, even more, that of the radical, anti-psychiatric writers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. These critiques generally presuppose a range of broad theoretical principles that are continuous with those presupposed in psychoanalysis. These include common causal processes, recurring models, modes of argumentation, even idiomatic preferences—in short, social discourse. For example, as to causal principles, writers in affective poststructuralism are likely to presuppose that unconscious factors in thought and action are unconscious for motivational or hedonic reasons and that they would be accessible to consciousness if they were not repressed. In other words, they tend to assume that one is unaware of one’s impulses because it is painful to be aware of them. In contrast, in affective science, most of what is unconscious is either inaccessible to consciousness due to the structure of the mind or has been misconstrued due to limitations on information processing. As to models, the psychoanalytic tradition relies heavily on force dynamics, particularly hydraulics. Certainly, magnitude of activation has a place in neurocognitive accounts of emotion. However, it operates differently from the hydraulic model in psychoanalytic tradition. As to modes of argumentation, the psychoanalytic tradition tends to rely much more heavily on clinical evidence or other single cases (sometimes of an almost anecdotal character), rather than controlled, experimental studies or broad statistical research. As the preceding references to affective science suggest, the second broad orientation in emotion study derives from cognitive science. There are certainly key figures in both cognitive and affective science. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to characterize this orientation

The two faces of affect study 25 by reference to individual theorists. Affective science is, rather, best identified by a range of empirical approaches and types of explanation that are common to various individual theories. For example, affective scientific writers are likely to draw on neurological data, verbal tests, behavioral research on humans and non-human animals, and related types of work. Moreover, in principle, affective scientists do not simply draw on individual experiments opportunistically. At least when following the norms of affective science, they seek to reconcile a wide array of data from different sources, articulating the most plausible and elegant account of as much of that data as possible. This practice is in keeping with the purposes of affective science— to formulate an account of emotion and related natural phenomena that yields precise and accurate descriptions and rigorous and robust explanations. Putting the same idea somewhat differently, Gonzaga and colleagues refer to “the methods of affective science,” including “the study of subjective experience, communicative display, relational outcomes, and physiological markers” in order to “test hypotheses about … distinct functions” (163). In contrast, Ruth Leys explains, with respect to the orientation I am calling “affective poststructuralism”: “what motivates these scholars is the desire to contest a certain account of how, in their view, political argument and rationality have been thought to operate.” Specifically, “[t]he claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril” (436). I should stress that this is not an absolute dichotomy. First, there are many individual theorists who combine principles and purposes from both orientations. For example, Donald Wehrs’s work brings together the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio with the poststructural psychoanalysis of Julia Kristeva. Though he is probably most often seen as working in affective science, his writings have clear connections with affective poststructuralism. Conversely, E. Ann Kaplan could readily be classed as working in affective science, though she is perhaps more commonly associated with affective poststructuralism. Moreover, it is commonplace for affective poststructuralists to make reference to particularly striking experiments or prominent theories in affective science. Such references are likely to be selective rather than systematic. However, they are not inconsequential. In keeping with this, Leys sees cognitive science as deeply important for writers who are paradigmatic representatives of affective poststructuralism, such as Brian Massumi.

26  The two faces of affect study I should note here that I am not claiming individual theorists “integrate” separate strands of affect study, producing a synthesis of otherwise separate theories. Rather, affective poststructuralist and affective scientific approaches to literature are complexes of ideas, vocabularies, models, and practices—again, discourses. These ideas, vocabularies, models, and practices tend to cluster into two groups. But individual theorists may draw on some elements from affective science and some from affective poststructuralism. In many cases, there are continuities across these tendencies in political aims as well. First of all, there are many literary critics and theorists who draw on cognitive and affective science for purposes of political analysis and critique. Consider, for example, work on postcolonial and ethnic minority literatures. In that field, we may point to books by Frederick Aldama, Richard Gordon, Patrick Hamilton, Suzanne Keen, Sue Kim, and others that draw on cognitive and affective science. Moreover, affective science often contributes directly to advancing political critique. We could isolate three broad areas of poststructuralist political engagement—social organization, language, and psychology. There is important political work of each sort in affective science as well. Of course, even here there are significant differences. Poststructuralist analyses of social organization are likely to be influenced by Foucault. In contrast, affective scientific analyses are more likely to draw on the social psychology of groups developed by Henri Tajfel and others. Poststructuralist approaches to language are likely to involve Derridaean deconstruction. In contrast, affective scientists engaged in the political analysis of language might draw on the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and his collaborators. Finally, affective poststructuralists most often develop psychological sources of political tendencies by reference to broadly psychoanalytic principles or responses to the psychoanalytic tradition, prominently those of Deleuze and Guattari. Affective scientists are likely to take up analyses of heuristics and biases of human cognition (developed in part from the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) or the findings of social neuroscience. Despite variations within each group and some convergence in interests, theorists as well as individual articles and even collective books may for the most part be roughly classed into one or the other category. For example, Gregg and Seigworth’s Affect Theory Reader falls squarely into the category of affective poststructuralism. It does not even have index entries for Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, Jaak Panksepp, Keith Oatley, Nico Frijda, Martin Hoffman, or other major figures in current affective science. The towering figures of

The two faces of affect study 27 affective poststructuralism would include Deleuze and Guattari, who are almost unknown in affective science. Neither they, nor such influential affective poststructuralists as Lawrence Grossberg or Brian Massumi appear in The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences. Even such a widely influential figure as Michel Foucault is important in The Affect Theory Reader but appears in only a very limited way in The Oxford Companion. Here, too, the division is not absolute. As we will see in Chapter 3, one important family of theories in affective science posits discrete, innate systems of emotions—for example, for anger, fear, and disgust. One influential theory of this sort is “differential emotions theory,” which “draws from Darwin (1809–1882) and more substantially from Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991). It assumes that emotions constitute the primary motivational system for human behaviour and that each emotion has unique motivational and regulatory functions” (Izard and King 117). A number of writers in affective poststructuralism assume something along the lines of differential emotions theory. Some draw particularly on Tomkins (see, for example, Anna Gibbs), sometimes influenced by his idea of affect programs. As Klaus Scherer explains, [Tomkins] suggested that the affect system consists of a limited number of basic or fundamental emotions that are directly linked to the motivational system … Following Darwin, Tomkins argued that basic emotions are subserved by phylogenetically evolved, genetically encoded, and universal affect programs [which define emotional response]. (“Affect Programs” 18) But, once again, the sources of affective science and affective poststructuralism involve more differences than similarities. The same point holds for modes of argument and analysis. Though they often converge at the observational level, they diverge in their treatment of even shared observations. For example, affective poststructuralists often frame their analyses in explicitly or implicitly deconstructive ways. Thus Seigworth and Gregg begin their introduction by alluding to the deconstruction of logocentrism: “How to begin when, after all, there is no pure or somehow originary state for affect?” (1). Even the term, “originary” (as opposed to “original” or “initial”), connects the comment with a particular philosophical tradition (recalling Martin Heidegger, for example). The point is to suggest that there is always already a disseminative play of affects, that there is no center and thus no ultimate stability to the system of affect.

28  The two faces of affect study Affective scientists would undoubtedly accept the view that there is no such thing as an ultimate starting point. However, they would likely consider this a trivial observation, not a statement with profound metaphysical or anti-metaphysical implications. Moreover, it is not the conclusion of deconstructive argumentation—for example, that the supposedly primary term presupposes the supposedly secondary or derivative term, so that the cause as presence is always already an effect. Rather it is the most banal commonsense—that a cause of a particular effect must itself be the effect of a different, prior cause, a point that has nothing to do with overturning “binaries.” The only issue is just how one gives more or less proximate and more or less general explanations for the phenomena currently under consideration. For example, one might ask why Jones responded to a particular event with a particular emotion—say, why he responded with fear when he entered the woods. An answer would involve reference to the “eliciting conditions” of the emotion. Eliciting conditions have two components—dispositions and current experiences; what Jones is like and what his circumstances are. Suppose Jones saw a snake; that would explain his emotion by reference to the eliciting conditions of his experience. If one wished, one could ask about Jones’s dispositions, as one might do if Jones only thought he saw a snake and did not really have good reason for the misconstrual. This would also lead us to components—innate emotion systems, early experiences that helped to shape those systems (e.g., a traumatic early experience with snakes), later emotions that have ongoing emotional consequences. One might then turn to the emotion systems, examining genetics and intrauterine environment, or shift to the sort of broad, functional explanation that characterizes evolutionary theory. In no case does the explanation reach a final point. However, at any given level, a (partial) account might very well explain enough for present purposes (e.g., why Jones responded differently than others present). The difference between affective poststructuralism and affective science is neatly illustrated by an aspect of what fostered the emphasis on affect in each case. In the preceding chapter, I noted the importance of a shift from a focus on capacity or structure to a focus on action or event. In the case of affective science, this shift was encouraged by a number of factors, including market considerations bearing on underresearched topics, but one of the most important contributors was technological. This was the refinement of brain scanning equipment, particularly the availability of fMRI. fMRI scans allow researchers to evaluate changes in localized blood flow in the brain. They thereby indicate what is happening in the brain as it processes experiences.

The two faces of affect study 29 Unlike structural MRIs, they convey information about events. This and related technologies were crucial for developing a more brainbased cognitive science and for shifting researchers’ focus to events, and thus perhaps more toward affect and motivation. Market and related factors presumably played a role in affective poststructuralism as well. Specifically, affective poststructuralism arose after there had been considerable critical and theoretical work taking up non-affective deconstruction. However, it is also important that perhaps the single most influential theorist for affective poststructuralists has been Gilles Deleuze. As Daniel Smith and John Protevi explain, Deleuze set out “to develop a metaphysics in which … event replaces essence.” It is consistent with the general tone of the two approaches to affect that affective scientists took up emotion in part due to a technological development that provided new data in empirical research, whereas affective poststructuralists were encouraged in their study of affect by fundamental metaphysics. Note that this divergence occurs in their shared (partial) shift from structure to event. Perhaps the most fundamental differences between affective poststructuralists and affective scientists may be found in the ways they define their object of study. Take, for example, the preliminary definition of emotion articulated by the pioneering affective scientist, Nico Frijda. Frijda writes that emotion is an “inner state that predicts forthcoming behavior,” such that emotions may be conceived of, in a preliminary way, as “tendencies to establish, maintain, or disrupt a relationship with the environment,” where even the “inner experience” of an emotion “is to a large extent awareness of action tendency” (Emotions 71). Frijda here tries to follow the basic scientific principle of rendering his definition operational in the sense of correlatable with observations; he also seeks to fulfill a fundamental desideratum of cognitive science, allowing processes to be algorithmically specifiable to as great a degree as possible. To be algorithmically specifiable is to allow for fully explicit steps leading from inputs to outputs. In Frijda’s case, the first step in allowing for this is defining the inputs (a relation between the organism and its environment) and the outputs (action, preceded by action readiness, along with the subjective experience or feeling of that action readiness). In contrast, Seigworth and Gregg define “affect” as “an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities” (1, emphasis in the original). To get some purchase on such a definition, we need to look, not at scientific method, but at

30  The two faces of affect study the intellectual background of the definition. Here, I would step back first to the psychoanalytic tradition. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis’s Language of Psychoanalysis provides an authoritative account of key concepts in psychoanalysis, focusing on Freud’s writings, but drawing also on Lacanian ideas in the French lineage that has been so important for poststructuralism generally. They write that “affect is the qualitative expression of the quantity of instinctual energy and of its fluctuations” (13). In the classical psychoanalytic account of motivation, we are animated by flows of energy that manifest certain drives—sexual and ego drives (or instincts), in one version, Eros and the death drive in another version. These drives are largely modeled on a hydraulic system where they may be blocked, diverted, backed up, exert more or less pressure, and seep through cracks. That blockage, and so forth, is produced by other drives (as when the sexual and ego drives conflict), by psychological agencies, such as the superego or conscience, or by the world. These variations in flows of drive energy are what define affects, as when frustration from the world causes sexual energy to be blocked, giving rise to anger. (For example, Rycroft writes that “nonsatisfaction of a drive” may lead to “aggression” due to frustration [55].) These points do not entirely clarify Seigworth and Gregg’s definition, but they at least suggest where such clarification might begin. These differences in definition and lineage are in part a mere matter of historical accident—who was reading which theorist at a particular time in particular university disciplines. However, these definitional divergences are also connected with the difference in primary goals that mark the two orientations. As Louis Charland explains, “When the term ‘affect’ is employed in the expression ‘affective science’ it is usually meant to demarcate a distinct scientific domain of inquiry” (9). In other words, there is an affective science because affects are assumed to constitute a natural kind requiring description and explanation. In contrast, Ruth Leys stresses the political goals of affective poststructuralists and their associated commitment “to the idea that there is a gap between the subject’s affects and its cognition or appraisal of the affective situation or object, such that cognition or thinking comes ‘too late’ for reasons, beliefs, intentions, and meanings to play the role in action and behavior usually accorded to them” (443). (Again, Leys does not distinguish the group as affective poststructuralists; however, her claims apply most clearly and fully to that group.) This is a view broadly in keeping with claims by Deleuze. Felicity Coleman explains that “according to Deleuze, the affect is a transitory thought or thing that occurs prior to an idea or perception” (11) and “can compel systems of knowledge, history, memory, and circuits of power” (12).

The two faces of affect study 31 The political commitment of affective poststructuralists has at least two consequences. First, it orients the analysis to political consequences rather than scientific method. Needless to say, the two are not mutually exclusive. However, they do incline us to frame problems differently and to focus on different aspects of problems. Second, it emphasizes the unconscious aspect of affect and in particular the ways in which unconscious affect can be at odds with conscious processes, to some extent enabling links with psychoanalytic lines of thought. On the other hand, even here there are points of convergence. For example, a crucial implication of the “commitment” discussed by Leys is that logic and evidence will not suffice to alter one’s politics; an affective change is needed. This is consistent with, for example, Keith Oatley’s observation that “when one is in the grip of a strong emotion, it can be changed only by another emotion” (Such Stuff). More simply, belief alone does not prompt action; for that, motivation is required, thus emotion. Going in the other direction, we find strains of affective poststructuralism that recall Frijda’s account of emotion as well. For instance, speaking of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Massumi writes that “affect” does not denote “a personal feeling.” Rather, it is “an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in the body’s capacity to act” (“Notes” xvi). The statement is far from identical with Frijda’s assertion. Frijda and other affective scientists would be unlikely to accept the characterization of affect as “prepersonal.” Indeed, affective science tends to view emotion as very personal in varying either with individual interests (in appraisal theory) or with individual experience (in a perceptual-associative account of emotion). Moreover, for an affective scientist, the initial emotional response would be to the threat or opportunity posed by the situation, not to one’s “capacity to act.” Capacity to act enters, rather, into the elaboration of that initial emotional response (e.g., in what is called “secondary appraisal” [see Smith and Kirby], where one considers what one might do in response to current conditions). Despite such differences, however, there are broad similarities as well—in the relation between affect and action. In sum, there is a regular and systematic divergence across affect theories such that it is reasonable to isolate two broad orientations in the study of affect—affective science and affective poststructuralism. But at the same time there is enough convergence between the two, enough overlap in the phenomena they identify and the ways they treat those phenomena, that it makes sense to class them together as forms of affect study. The following chapters will focus on affective

32  The two faces of affect study science. There are four main reasons for this focus. First, both are large fields of research. Both require considerable background in nonliterary precursors (e.g., in theories of emotion from affective science or in Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida for affective poststructuralism). Moreover, both encompass large numbers of literary developments. It is difficult to cover one orientation adequately in a short book. It would be impossible to cover both. The second reason for a focus on affective science concerns diversity. Both orientations are large and diverse. However, affective poststructuralism is arguably even more diverse than affective science. Put in a slightly critical way, one might say that affective poststructuralism is more eclectic than affective science. Put more positively, one might say that the poststructuralist orientation is less exclusionary. Consider, for example, two prominent theorists of this orientation—Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi. Ahmed’s work draws not only on Derrida and psychoanalytic tradition, but on philosophical schools ranging from speech-act theory to phenomenology; in addition, Ahmed alludes to work in appraisal theory and other aspects of affective science. Massumi bases much of his work on the ideas of Deleuze; however, he regularly makes reference to neuroscientific and related studies. In contrast, affective scientists rarely draw on the primary sources of affective poststructuralism. Affective science is certainly diverse. However, its diversity seems more constrained, less wide-ranging in its sources, and more amenable to systematization (e.g., regarding different sorts of explanation for emotion episodes). Thus, of the two, it is arguably easier to treat affective science in a concise but still useful way. In keeping with the discussion in the previous chapter, the third reason for the book’s focus on affective science is personal. I simply know affective science much better than I know affective poststructuralism. This is particularly true for Deleuze’s work (which, to be honest, I find very difficult to understand). Conversely, there are many people in literary study whose grasp of thinkers such as Deleuze is far superior to mine. Moreover, I have mixed feelings about the sources of affective poststructuralism. I find Foucault’s critique of institutions and aspects of Foucaultian discourse analysis to be extremely valuable. Lacan’s early phenomenological work is, in my view, very suggestive, though his more influential poststructural writings are much more problematic. Finally, unlike virtually everyone else in literary study, I believe Derrida’s account of meaning is entirely inadequate and his highly influential modes of argumentation—concerning, for example, hierarchized, binary oppositions—are largely invalid.3 Put simply, there

The two faces of affect study 33 are many people who would be better able to write a book on affective poststructuralism, for reasons of both knowledge and sympathy. On the other hand, I of course do not believe that my skepticism about some aspects of affective poststructuralism is merely whimsical, which brings me to the final reason for focusing on affective science. It does seem fairly clear that affective science is more rigorous—in the technical sense of being more fully operationalized and more fully algorithmic—as well as more lucidly articulated and better supported empirically. Conversely, affective poststructuralism is often much more vague, elliptical, and metaphorical, based on the largely unsupported conjectures of psychoanalytic tradition (see Grunbaum on the lack of empirical support for psychoanalysis), drawing on the highly problematic hydraulic model for affects,4 implicitly taking up the at best questionable linguistic assumptions of deconstruction, as well as sometimes misunderstanding or simplifying the affective science to which it makes reference (see Leys; Papoulias and Callard). At the same time, I do not take my respect for some aspects of poststructuralist work to be merely idiosyncratic either. There are points of considerable value in affective poststructuralism. These values are in keeping with the main purposes of affective poststructuralism— ethical–political critique and activism. Even when affective scientists address political issues, they may not do so with the same urgency and practical engagement as affective poststructuralists.

Sara Ahmed on happy families and affect aliens In the preceding section, we considered general, theoretical divergence at a relatively abstract level. In this section, we will examine a specific case. Prolific and widely cited, Sara Ahmed is exemplary in the field. The title of her position at the University of London—Professor in Race and Cultural Studies—advertises the political orientation and cultural studies background that characterize affect theory more broadly. Her essay “Happy Objects” is appropriately placed as the opening chapter of The Affect Theory Reader. It draws on a range of theoretical precursors and as such illustrates the broad intellectual scope of affective poststructuralism. It is also politically engaged. The essay involves several general arguments concerning the nature of happiness and the nature of social organization. A central claim of the essay is that “[a]ffect is what … sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (29). Specifically, in her view, groups have certain shared attitudes toward “objects” in the broad sense of targets of intention (see 41). Those shared attitudes do at least two things. First,

34  The two faces of affect study they link the objects with values. For example, the “happy family” is an ideal imagined by mainstream Euro-American society and associated with present or future happiness. The affective attitude—which takes the family as a central means of happiness—gives value to the family and makes it an ideal. As Ahmed puts it, “to be happy about something makes something good” (29). Second, the shared attitudes define group cohesion. In Ahmed’s words, “[g]roups cohere around a shared orientation toward some things as being good, treating some things and not others as the cause of delight” (35). Readers familiar with affective science may see several points of similarity with Ahmed’s views. For example, some research in affective science points toward associative connections linking moods and even abstract ideas, such that it is easier to recall information when one is in the same mood state as at the time of learning (see Kringelbach and Phillips 177). This is not entirely dissimilar to Ahmed’s notion that affect “preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (29). More strikingly, Ahmed’s observation about emotional response and evaluation recalls the “affect heuristic” discussed by affective scientists. The affect heuristic is the use of one’s “gut feeling” to evaluate, for example, a person, animal, thing, place, or situation. This process is also known as the “affect-as-information approach.” According to this approach, “people make evaluative judgements essentially by asking, ‘How do I feel about this?’” (Clore 11). Often, it seems, we rely on our spontaneous emotional response to judge a target’s worth, even if we subsequently articulate a rationalization of that judgment (see Kringelbach and Phillips 152). Moreover, Ahmed’s account of groups recalls research in in-group versus out-group divisions based on identity categories. An in-group is any set of individuals with whom one shares some property that one considers in some way definitive of oneself (an identity category), such as sex, sexual orientation, race, or religion. Once identity groups are established, one begins to evaluate the properties and activities of in-group members differently from those of out-group members. Moreover, one’s emotional attitude toward ingroup members is different from that toward out-group members. In other words, both evaluation and emotional response are inseparable from identity categorization and social group definition. On the other hand, the reference to the social psychology of groups suggests that the convergence between Ahmed and affective science is not complete. There is reason to believe that in-group versus outgroup divisions are produced by simple, cognitive processes of categorization. Even arbitrary divisions into group A and group B will produce emotional preferences and differences in evaluation that did

The two faces of affect study 35 not pre-exist the categorization (see Duckitt 85 on these “minimal groups”). It is no doubt true that more stable groups do develop shared preferences. However, group coherence does not begin with such preferences. Nor is its development confined to such preferences. Group coherence involves common beliefs about factual matters and general principles, as well as complex, interpersonally integrated propensities and competencies (including abilities to interact in practices ranging from conversation to driving). All this may be referred to as “practical identity,” in contrast with categorial identity (see Hogan, Understanding Nationalism 25–37). In addition, it is clear that we do not always follow the affect heuristic. We may recognize that something is bad even while taking pleasure in it. We have capacities for non-affect-based evaluation, and even some degree of affect modulation in those cases. Finally, it seems clear that associative complexes have many ways of cohering. They are not confined to emotional connection, but may be linked causally, categorically, logically, spatially, or temporally, for example. Thus it seems that Ahmed’s claims about society, value, and affect involve considerable overgeneralization. But that does not mean they are not insightful. First, Ahmed draws our attention to the ways in which social groups establish values through fostering particular emotions toward particular “objects,” especially particular actions and situations. Ahmed stresses happiness and, to a lesser extent, anxiety. There are two problems with this emphasis. The first is that there are other emotions at issue as well, such as anger and resentment, as is clear from Ahmed’s examples. On the other hand, Ahmed could simply respond that this is a matter of emphasizing particularly important emotions, not delimiting the entire set of relevant affects. The second problem is that happiness and anxiety are not precisely parallel, nor are they precisely what Ahmed seems to have in mind. What appears to be going on in the cases discussed by Ahmed is the following: Social judgments characterize certain situations—such as being part of a family—as necessary conditions for enduring joy. Such judgments characterize other situations—such as having loved ones killed in a terrorist attack—as sufficient conditions for enduring sorrow. We may add to Ahmed’s account that these are rarely arbitrary imaginations. Rather, they are most often social specifications of common human aspirations, defined by emotion systems. For example, the family is the main social structure for organizing relations of attachment and (ideally) rendering them as secure as possible. Secure attachment relations are important to an enduring sense of contentment, thus to happiness. In any case, the parallel emotions here are happiness and sorrow. For both

36  The two faces of affect study social and biological reasons, we imagine certain situations as conducing toward happiness and others as conducing toward sorrow. As the former come to appear more likely and the latter come to appear less likely, we experience hope; as the former come to appear less likely and the latter come to appear more likely, we experience anxiety. Thus Ahmed’s analysis might be phrased more accurately in terms of experiencing hope or anxiety at the prospect of happiness or sorrow. She adds to this a nuanced understanding of one important way that subgroups are defined. Specifically, Ahmed isolates those members of a group—for example, a family or a nation—who do not share the dominant and normative emotional attitudes within the group. She refers to these as “affect aliens,” people whose emotional orientation differentiates them from the group. In terms of the distinction between categorial and practical identity, we might say that it is possible to form (categorial) in-group versus out-group divisions by reference to conflicts in practical identity, including conflicts in emotional response. Categorial identification as members of one family, nation, or other group leads us to expect greater uniformity in practical identity. For example, a patriotic American is unlikely to resent a German for not reverencing the U.S. flag, but may resent fellow Americans for not doing so. This may foster a further in-group/out-group subcategorization of loyal versus disloyal Americans. Ahmed lists three types of affect aliens: “feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, and melancholic migrants” (30), later adding “the angry black woman” (39). Ahmed’s development of this list suggests that we might distinguish two broad senses of “affect alien.” First, there are affect aliens in the sense of people who are genuinely alienated from socially normative emotional attitudes. This group would include for instance many sexual minorities who until recently could not hope for the same sort of family as prescribed by society—though they undoubtedly still did hope for secure attachment relations in presumably much the same degree as sexual majorities. Second, there are affect aliens in the sense of imagined types of emotional dissidents, classes defined ideologically by the dominant society. These include the figures mentioned by Ahmed, understood as stereotypes rather than as real people. Indeed, these are recurring stereotypes that operate socially to dismiss the emotional responses of real people. For example, when a feminist objects to sexism, she or he may be written off as simply lacking a sense of humor, as being a feminist kill-joy, thus a stereotypical affect alien. Of course, a feminist may feel genuinely emotionally alienated as well. The point is that “affect alien” is ambiguous between an experiential and an ideologically functional sense, a sense in which the feminist

The two faces of affect study 37 feels alienated and a sense in which she is dismissed as stereotypically oversensitive and humorless. The two types of affect alien are of course related. We all sometimes find ourselves offended (like feminist kill-joys), reviled (like unhappy queers), excluded (like melancholic migrants), or disrespected (like angry black women), thus genuinely affectively alienated. At least in many cases, this alienation is related to what might be called “shallow empathizing.” For example, non-feminists might empathize enough with a given feminist to recognize that she or he is offended. But the non-feminist may not make the extra effort needed to understand why the feminist responded to a particular situation with such a feeling. That shallow empathizing is often inseparable from objectifying explanation, the attribution of character traits that putatively govern the behavior of the person in an almost mechanical way (e.g., in the view that feminists are humorless and overly sensitive). Rather than a sense of shared subjectivity, there is instead a further sort of alienation, expressed in the stereotype of an affect alien. The feminist kill-joy is often simply someone who does not let sexist jokes or actions pass unremarked. Deep empathy may reveal that one would feel justified hurt or anger if one were to change places with the “feminist kill-joy” oneself. But objectifying trait attribution, connected with the feminist kill-joy stereotype, allows one to dismiss her or him as lacking a sense of humor. This in turn is likely to enhance the feminist’s experiential affect alienation. The points are far from irrelevant to literature. First, the same stereotypes that turn up in social discourse generally are likely to appear in the stories that are part of that discourse. Thus we are likely to find feminist kill-joys turning up not only in what people say at the dinner table, but in the television programs they watch as well. Second, and in a way more interestingly, experiential affect aliens seem to be ubiquitous in literature. Indeed, once the idea is mentioned, it begins to seem as if affect aliens constitute the majority of literary heroes. For example, both the works considered in this book—Romeo and Juliet and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—concern affect aliens. Shakespeare’s play could be understood as treating the tragic results of trying to impose affect conformity, as we might call it, on people whose attachment bonds deviate from social norms. Nevada, which focuses on transgender experience, more obviously treats the social regulation of identity; however, that regulation is not unrelated to imposed uniformity of feeling, and it certainly creates affect alienation. This ubiquity of affect aliens may reflect the fact that most of us—whether members of oppressed groups or not—are keenly aware of the points at which

38  The two faces of affect study our own emotional responses do not conform to social norms. In this sense, we are all affect aliens. In sum, there are significant and consequential differences between affective science and affective poststructuralism. There are differences in intellectual background, in theoretical presuppositions and models, and in the predominant goals guiding the projects. There are at the same time enough points of convergence to view these as alternative orientations within the shared category of affect studies. Those similarities and differences at some places indicate that affective poststructuralism and affective science are incompatible and that choosing one means abandoning the other. (For example, this may be the case for certain deconstructive claims about meaning.) But at other places similarities and differences of these two orientations provide the basis for a productive and potentially illuminating synthesis. This is particularly true of integrations that bring together the political vigor of affective poststructuralism with the empirical and analytic rigor of affective science.

Notes 1 For a fuller discussion of Foucault’s ideas and citation of relevant texts, see my Philosophical Approaches 179–196; for a concise, alternative account of Foucaultian discourse analysis, or critical discourse analysis, as it is often called, see Mills. 2 For a detailed discussion of these various issues with deconstruction, along with citations of relevant texts, see the second chapter of my The Politics of Interpretation. 3 This is not to say that the binary hierarchies are valid. Deconstructionists are right to reject a range of politically oppressive hierarchies. The point is that deconstructive arguments for such rejection are, I believe, misguided. For discussion of these points, see chapter two of my Politics. 4 For some problems with the hydraulic model, see Toates on the idea that sexual desire accumulates, and see Bushman on anger.

3 What is emotion?

Affects and emotion episodes In contrast with the somewhat abstract, even philosophical use of “affect” in affective poststructuralism, the term is taken up more straightforwardly in affective science. As Nico Frijda and Klaus Scherer write, the word “affect” “is often used in a general sense to refer to a class or category of mental states that includes emotions, moods, attitudes, interpersonal stances, and affect dispositions” (“Affect” 10). In keeping with this definition, affects are perhaps best understood as either emotion episodes themselves, or subjective motivational tendencies that guide the onset, continuation, or alteration of emotion episodes. For example, a mood is an affect because it enhances the likelihood of an emotion episode consistent with the mood (e.g., a melancholic mood makes it more likely that one will react to any given event or situation with sadness). In the second subsection, we will focus on emotion episodes. However, before turning to that, it is worth briefly considering the other types of affect enumerated by Frijda and Scherer. Some varieties of affect As Frijda explains, “Mood is often defined as an affective state of long duration, low intensity, and a certain diffuseness” (“Mood” 258; see also Oatley, Keltner, and Jenkins 30). Perhaps the key feature of moods, however, is that they “render one susceptible to emotion arousal by a large range of events that match the mood’s affective tone” (258).1 This is termed “mood-congruent processing” (see Oatley, Best 201) or “emotional congruency” (Kringelbach and Philips 177). Mood-congruent processing enters significantly into literary response. Perhaps the most obvious correlate for mood in literary study

40  What is emotion? is the Sanskrit concept of rasa. Often translated as “sentiment,” the term refers to the emotion experienced by readers or audience members when engaged with a literary work. It is particularly relevant here as it has been taken up by writers in cognitive and affective science (see my “Toward” and Chapter 2 of The Mind; Oatley, Passionate 34–37; and Pandit, “Psychology”). Specifically, rasa theorists maintain that a work has a dominant rasa that contextualizes or inflects the more localized emotions that appear in the course of the work. In a mirthprovoking piece, we might laugh at someone undergoing an apparently dangerous fall, in part because we anticipate that things will turn out well. The same fall is likely to provoke fear and shock in works that are predominantly somber in their emotional tone. One of the most striking features of Romeo and Juliet is that it continually establishes a rasa of mirth (combined with romantic love). Shakespeare has his characters engage in hyperbolic boasting, outrageous sexual banter, and groan-provoking wordplay. These are all characteristics of a mirthful piece. But then Mercutio is wounded— though even then the lighthearted playfulness of the piece continues, with Mercutio making grim humor out of his “grave” condition (III.i.96). The change in mood with Mercutio’s death will provoke different responses in different readers. However, in general it should increase the shock produced by the death and the swift unraveling of the tenuous strands that bind the social and personal lives of our hero and heroine. One might argue that this has thematic purposes in rendering more salient and powerful the gravity of civil conflict—whether it be a matter of different royal houses, different religions, or different classes, all indirectly represented in the play by warring families. Returning to the types of affect, we next come to attitudes. As Richard Petty, Leandre Fabrigar, and Duane Wegener explain, “Attitudes refer to people’s global evaluations of any object such as oneself, other people, possessions, issues, abstract concepts, and so forth” (752; see also Petty, Wegener, and Fabrigar 59). Attitudes may or may not figure prominently in any given literary work. They are crucial to Romeo and Juliet, as there are dominant social attitudes that prevent the lovers from uniting. The opening of the play, just after the Prologue, presents us with two servants of the Capulets whose prime concern in life appears to be their attitude of active antagonism toward the Montagues. For example, Sampson declares that “A dog of the house of Montague moves me” (I.i.vii). The suggestion is twofold. First, if we take “dog” literally, his attitude is so broad in its range that it attaches itself even to animals linked with the enemy. Second, if we take “dog” metaphorically, his attitude is

What is emotion? 41 so intense that he takes any member of the rival household to be no better than a dog. Interpersonal stance is a subject’s emotional orientation toward another person or persons in a particular situation. In most cases, one expects stance to be congruent with attitude or with mood. Interpersonal stance is likely to have consequences for the triggering of emotion episodes in both the subject and his or her interlocutor. We see this in the thumb biting business at the start of Romeo and Juliet. Sampson and Gregory begin with a hostile attitude and a boisterous mood. These factors foster an aggressively confrontational, provocative stance toward the Montague servants who enter subsequently. The interpersonal stance of Sampson and Gregory either provokes or enhances a similar stance on the part of Abraham and Balthasar. The conflict quickly escalates into an emotion episode of anger, with its consequent battle. Finally, affect dispositions are the most enduring subjective factors contributing to emotion episodes. They involve “stable personality traits [that] reflect individual differences in reactivity to emotional and affectively valenced environmental cues” (Revelle and Scherer 304). Consistent with being features of personality, they are also referred to as “trait affectivity” or “trait emotionality.” The most obvious example of this in Romeo and Juliet is Tybalt. Tybalt’s belligerence is a function of high “trait anger” and “trait disgust.” In other words, Tybalt’s behavior evidences a strong affect disposition toward hate and contempt. This becomes important in the course of the play as this affect disposition fosters emotion episodes of rage with consequent impetuousness, which in turn lead to intense emotion episodes on the part of others. In other words, Tybalt’s trait anger gives rise to episodes of rage on his part, which themselves inspire rage on the part of others. The spirals of violence depicted and criticized in the play are at least in part a function of the trait affectivity of the most belligerent person involved, whose hate and anger appear to be far more contagious than Benvolio’s calm and conciliatory disposition and behavior. It might be valuable to add one further category to this list, one that is “narrower” than an emotion or emotion episode, as mood, attitude, and interpersonal stance are “broader.” Roddy Cowie argues that most “emotional” aspects of everyday life do not develop into full-fledged emotion episodes. There is an emotional “coloring” to our interactions with the world, composed of “fragments” (74). Rather than “fragments,” we might refer to these as “microemotions.” Microemotions are fleeting bits of expression, action, feeling, or other components of emotion episodes. We will not generally be concerned

42  What is emotion? with microemotions in what follows. However, this under-researched area of affect study has potential relevance for the fine-grained explication of literature and film—for example, in the examination of the affective shifts in the course of two characters’ dialogue. Emotion episodes Again, the use of “affect” in affective science tacitly relies on the idea of an emotion episode. Specifically, an emotion is a relatively shortterm motivational impulse, defined by a series of recurring features that constitute an episode. Though commonly thought of as a subjective feeling, in fact an emotion is, as Frijda and Scherer put it, “a multicomponential phenomenon” (“Emotion” 142). In the words of Piotr Winkielman and Kent Berridge, it is “an orchestrated response to a significant event across several systems” (395). David Matsumoto delimits some of those components, noting that “[m]any theories of emotion suggest that when emotions are elicited, they recruit a host of responses, which include expressive behaviours, physiological reactions, certain types of cognitions, and subjective experience” (175). Matsumoto’s list obviously goes well beyond the commonsense view that an emotion is (in Matsumoto’s phrase) a “subjective experience.” However, even his list is somewhat abbreviated. The first component of an emotion episode comprises the eliciting conditions for the emotion, the causes of the emotion. There are always two subcomponents of eliciting conditions: receptive conditions and experiential conditions (or events). The receptive conditions are all the factors we have already considered. A person experiences an event or condition in the context of his or her affect dispositions, attitudes, moods, and stances, and it is the combination of all these that provokes the emotion. As this suggests, eliciting conditions for emotion episodes are often highly complex. Consider again the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Sampson and Gregory begin with some degree of contempt for the Montagues. Conversely, they have concerns about the group status of the Capulets relative to the Montagues and an associated disposition toward shame at any diminution of the status of the former relative to the latter. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, they have concerns about their own, individual status relative to one another. For example, early on, Gregory suggests that Sampson may be a coward (I.i.8–9). This tacitly challenges Sampson’s status as a man. Sampson replies with boasting that he will engage in the manly actions of fighting with the men and having sex with the women (I.i.14–17). When

What is emotion? 43 the Montagues appear, Sampson and Gregory initially show signs of fear. However, their concerns about manly appearance quickly drive them to vie with one another in confrontational behavior, eventually leading Sampson to bite his thumb, initiating the quarrel. As these points suggest, the target of an emotion should be distinguished from the eliciting conditions for an emotion, though the former is most often a part of the latter. The target or object of an emotion is that at which the emotion is aimed. Moreover, the actual emotion should not be confused with the emotion label, which is to say, the word or words that one would use to characterize one’s emotional state. It may seem that we simply introspect our emotion states and that we directly know the targets of our emotions. We are of course usually right about what emotion we are experiencing and what its target is. However, our understanding in both cases is overly simple and sometimes it is simply wrong. As Joseph LeDoux explains, “much research suggests that we lack direct knowledge of the processes and motivations underlying our decisions and behaviors and instead we often confabulate explanations for them after the fact, making them seem more rational than they are” (Anxious 81). Frederic Toates makes the point that “[p]eople tend to make sense of their bodily reaction by labelling it in terms of its most likely cause” (168). For example, “[a]rousal induced by physical exertion, humour or exposure to erotic stimulation tends to make an attractive partner still more attractive but an unattractive partner still more unattractive … Arousal is interpreted in terms of the available stimulus” (169). Thus, if asked, Sampson and Gregory (were they real people) would probably say that they felt hatred for the Montagues. That is true; they did feel the combination of anger and disgust that marks hatred, and the Montagues were the targets of that feeling. However, they also felt fear of shame, both collective shame in relation to the Montagues and individual, gender-related shame in relation to one another. They also felt rivalry with one another, and perhaps a boisterous rowdiness. Indeed, these other feelings and other targets may be more important than hatred of the Montagues. One’s understanding of the sources, nature, and consequences of an event are clearly important for one’s emotional response to the event, as well as one’s emotion labeling and target isolation. That understanding is in part a matter of what one experiences directly. However, it is also in part a matter of what one simulates. Simulation is the imagination of particular conditions and particular, usually causal sequences of events without the constraints of perception and memory—indeed, with the ability to vary particular features of perceived conditions and

44  What is emotion? sequences hypothetically. For example, one might simulate how one’s life would have been different if, at a key point, one had chosen a different profession or taken a different job offer. The relation between simulation and emotion elicitation is nicely illustrated by Tybalt, who feels quite exercised about matters he has not witnessed. For example, on recognizing Romeo at the Capulet’s party, he becomes enraged. This is in part due to his simulation of Romeo’s facial expression, unseen due to his mask, and of Romeo’s unheard comments on the festivities. Specifically, he imagines that Romeo has come “[t]o fleer and scorn” (I.iv.175). In fact, mockery is not at all what Romeo is engaging in. Tybalt’s simulation here is wholly misguided. Of course, this simulation is not simply a cause of Tybalt’s rage; it is in part the result of rage as well, part of a spiral in which an attitude of hate inspires an episode of anger, which guides certain sorts of simulation through mood-congruent processing, which enhances the anger, and so on. Simulation is particularly important for thinking about literature. As Keith Oatley notes, “fiction is a kind of simulation” (Such Stuff). The point holds for both authors and readers. Authors simulate the story as they write and rewrite it, giving us as much as is conveyed on the page. Readers simulate, in part, what the author conveyed; this is “guided simulation,” imagination that follows the “instructions” that constitute the literary text (to take up Elaine Scarry’s idea that “a poem or a novel is a set of instructions for mental composition” [244]). In addition, readers fill in what is left out of the text—often including, for example, unmentioned details of character appearance or intention. Like Tybalt, readers’ unguided simulations in part derive from their emotional responses and in part create those responses. Similar points hold for attentional orientation, another component of an emotion episode. In part, our emotional response to a situation guides just what we pay attention to. I look at my campsite and see two tents, a campfire, some trees in the background, and a bear. My fear of the bear leads me to focus my attention on it. But of course that attention makes the bear more salient and thus a more forceful component of the eliciting conditions driving my emotional response. The idea of attentional orientation is relevant to characters, authors, and readers or viewers. “Reading for plot” is a form of selective attention, usually aimed at highly emotionally salient events. The emotional orientation of attention may lead us to focus on what is most important in works. But it can also be limiting. I have found, for example, that students are often unforgiving of characters that they dislike and they may attend selectively to details of characters’ thoughts or actions that are consistent with their negative (or positive) judgments. This is

What is emotion? 45 yet another form of affect-congruent processing. For example, in Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh is a complex character who, like everyone I know, sometimes thinks ill of other people. At one point, wandering aimlessly about London, he decides to walk at some distance behind a pretty young woman; he has a fantasy about asking her to join him for an ice cream, which he clearly has no real intention of doing. My students, highly attuned to the “stalker” stereotype, immediately class Peter Walsh in that role and respond to him with contempt. This in turn draws their attention to all the most negative aspects of his personality. As we already know from the preceding chapter, in an affective science account, the main purpose of emotions is action. There are two stages to action—action readiness and action outcomes. Action readiness is the preparation for behaviors designed to sustain or intensify a positive situation or alter a negative situation. Action outcomes are the enactment of such behaviors. Thus when facing a physical danger, I might prepare to flee, tensing my leg muscles, bending my knees slightly, leaning a bit forward, and so forth. That is action readiness. My flight itself would be the action outcome. Physiological outcomes, such as changes in heart or respiration rate, are a key part of action readiness; for example, changes in the autonomic nervous system may facilitate flight. As already noted, a great deal of Romeo and Juliet is comic. One striking instance of this is Benvolio’s account of Tybalt’s entrance in the opening scene, which illustrates some of the preceding points in a comic way. Specifically, Benvolio explains that “[t]he fiery Tybalt” entered “with his sword prepared” and “breathed defiance to my ears” (I.i.105–106). “Fiery” points to his impetuous and angry disposition. However, it also simply suggests heat, which may be a physiological accompaniment to anger. The fact that he “breathed defiance” refers principally to his antagonistic shouts. But the phrase also suggests that Benvolio could hear Tybalt’s breath, heavy and loud, suggesting physiological arousal. The phrase is, as such, comic since breathing of such violence is more ludicrous than awe- or fear-inspiring. In any case, having “his sword prepared” is a clear case of action readiness. He then acts almost immediately. But his actions are absurd, entirely ineffective in altering the situation, for he merely “swung about his head and cut the winds” (I.i.107). Given the actual outcome of his actions, it seems that Tybalt is little more than a braggart soldier, a comic type who makes a great show of valor, but merely creates a ridiculous spectacle. Perhaps the most obvious component of an emotion episode is the feeling or phenomenological tone of the emotion. This is the subjective quality of an emotion. It is a wholly private experience in the sense

46  What is emotion? that no one else can literally feel our pain or joy. As such, it is perhaps what we most wish to share and are most certain cannot be shared. We see the desire for sharing in the lovers’ initial uncertainty about each other’s love (e.g., Juliet’s worry that Romeo’s “bent of love be honorable” [II.i.194]). We see the privacy of feeling in, for example, Romeo’s dispute with the Friar over Romeo’s (emotion-eliciting) situation upon being banished: “Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel” (III.iii.64). One common account of feeling is that it is a subjective experience of bodily alterations—physiological outcomes, action readiness, and action outcomes. The “embodied” account of feeling, just mentioned, has been widely celebrated in cognitive literary study. It may be traced back to William James. But its influence in literary study has been due principally to contemporary work by Antonio Damasio. LeDoux nicely summarizes the account, noting first how “William James proposed a feedback theory of feelings in the late nineteenth century, arguing that we do not run from a bear because we are afraid but instead that we are afraid because we run. The explanation for this is that feedback from the body during this behavior is felt by the brain as the emotion fear” (Anxious 132). LeDoux goes on to explain that “[l]ike James, Damasio emphasizes the importance of feedback from the entire body, including signals arising from the inner organs and tissues and from the muscles and joints of the skeleton and face.” Damasio coined the term “somatic markers” for “the signals resulting from the expression of bodily responses during an emotional episode” (Anxious 134; for Damasio’s discussion, see Chapter 8 of his Descartes’).2 Part of what “fiery Tybalt” manifests in his angry appearance is not a matter of action outcomes, action readiness, or even physiological outcomes that are part of action readiness. There is also his shouting and the angry tone we in the audience witnessed a few moments before Benvolio’s description. These are referred to as expressive or communicative outcomes. These are observable features of a person in an emotion episode, and they have the function of communicating information or, in some cases, misinformation, and thereby provoking either parallel or non-parallel (“complementary”) emotions in other people (or animals). “Complementary” here refers to the counterpart in some set of emotions, such as fear or antagonistic anger in response to someone else’s anger. Matsumoto explains that “[f]acial expressions of emotion”—we might add posture, tone of voice, and other features—“provide information to perceivers about the individual’s emotional state” (175–176; see also Rolls 55–56). Communicating grief, for example through sobbing, often functions to provoke a

What is emotion? 47 parallel or similar emotion, thus sympathy as well as actions of help and consolation (though it may also inspire the complementary feeling of Schadenfreude). The expression of some other emotions, in contrast, may be more likely to inspire complementary emotions. Thus Matsumoto comments that “[a]nger, for example, might have evolved to elicit fear-related responses and the inhibition of inappropriate action” (176; see also Evans 28–29). The items just discussed constitute the principal components of what we might call the initial emotion episode. By “initial emotion episode,” I mean the fundamental motivational impetus that results from the interconnection between subjective and situational factors. As self-conscious beings, however, we are not only motivated by emotions. We are motivated regarding emotions—as the preceding comments on emotion labeling may already have hinted. Emotion conceptualization, of which labeling is a part, affects the course of an emotion episode (see Lindquist and Barrett), perhaps because it affects simulation of past, present, and future, thereby in effect altering the eliciting conditions for the emotion. It is clear that our construal of the target alters the trajectory of the episode as well. Perhaps the most important form of behavior, including cognitive behavior, that bears on this “meta-emotional” part of an emotion episode is emotion regulation. Often, emotion regulation is “mood repair,” in which we “seek to maintain positive and attenuate unpleasant moods” (Frijda, “Mood” 259). But regulation is more general and occurs whenever we find an emotion socially inappropriate or otherwise undesirable. For example, one might have a funny thought at a funeral and try to suppress the feeling and its expression. Emotion regulation is clearly provoked by the event of an emotion episode. However, it also has a dispositional aspect. Some people appear better able to regulate emotions—or certain sorts of emotions—than others. Tybalt presents us with a case of a character who cannot regulate his emotions, or is unmotivated to do so. This comes out very strongly at the Capulets’ party, when Tybalt clashes with Capulet over Romeo’s presence. Capulet tells him to “be patient” (I.iv.190), which in this context means to modulate his impetuous emotion of anger. He also urges Tybalt to alter his emotion expression, saying, “put off these frowns” (I.v.192). Tybalt clearly finds it difficult to conform to these imperatives. The preceding reference to frowns should not be taken to indicate that emotion regulation is simply a matter of following “social display rules,” that is, “conventions regarding what kinds of expressions are appropriate at what times and by whom” (Hall 282–283). It may involve changing any component of the emotion episode, ideally to the

48  What is emotion? point of substituting a different emotion episode. Techniques of emotion regulation include changing one’s attention, leaving the situation, trying to simulate the consequences of the situation differently (e.g., more optimistically), or other practices (on some of these techniques, see McCrae and Gross 337 and 338). One of the most interesting forms of emotion regulation has been discussed insightfully by Lalita Pandit under the rubric of “emotion masking,” defined as the process “where one emotion conceals another” (“Emotion” 96). The key point about Pandit’s analysis is that it is an emotion that conceals another emotion, not simply an emotion expression that miscommunicates one’s real emotion. Mere concealed expression is the usual sense of “masking,” often as part of display rules. Thus Heider speaks of “masking by the behavior (usually the facial expression) of another emotion” (7). We might call the latter “expression masking.” Expression masking is often self-consciously deceitful or simply polite. As treated by Pandit, full emotion masking, in contrast, is more likely to be unselfconscious. In Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt is perhaps the major case of full emotion masking. His response to Romeo suggests just what is masked by his belligerence—a deep sense of shame, hinted at by his construal of Romeo’s attitude as mockery. Of course, a given emotion is more likely to facilitate some masking emotions rather than others. Shame is well-suited to rage (see Scheff 455) and thus readily masked by rage. Emotion regulation is one type of meta-emotional process. That is because emotion regulation is motivated behavior and, as such, involves emotion. One may have a meta-emotional response spontaneously or through effortful self-reflection. An interesting case of such self-reflection is interpersonal. It sometimes happens that one recognizes one’s own initial emotion in or by means of another person. That allows one’s emotional response to become an object of thought and thus an object of emotional response. One, so to speak, sees one’s own emotion as if it were someone else’s, and one then reacts to it, often less egocentrically. A fine example of this comes when Juliet hears that Romeo has slain Tybalt. First, she condemns Romeo, expressing her anger, distrust, and sense of betrayal. But then she hears the Nurse express virtually identical feelings and responds, first with criticism of the Nurse, then with (meta-emotional) shame over her earlier contempt for Romeo.

Theories of emotion Needless to say, not everyone in affective science would set out the components of emotion episodes as I have just done. Nonetheless,

What is emotion? 49 there seems to be general agreement on the usual features of such episodes and most disagreements would be a matter of details. In contrast, there are some serious divergences on the nature of explanatory principles. To organize these divergences, we may draw a broad distinction in mental architecture between structures and processes. Structures define the functional organization of the mind and the brain. Processes operate to produce outcomes from initial conditions, given that functional organization. Within affective science, there are differences of opinion regarding both structures and processes. The key difference in structure is between system-based approaches, which posit distinct systems for various “basic” emotions, and dimension-based approaches. The former posit, for example, pre-dedicated emotion systems for fear and anger. The latter do not accept our commonsense view that there are distinct emotion systems; instead, dimension-based approaches posit a single set of variable values, with apparently distinct emotions deriving from degrees of variation in the variables. For example, one common variable in such accounts concerns hedonic valence. Part of the difference between joy and sorrow is that the former is positively valenced, whereas the latter is negatively valenced. By this account, joy and sorrow are not the products of two different emotion systems, but rather the product of the ways in which a common set of emotion variables are set (e.g., whether the valence is positive or negative and in what degree). As indicated in the preceding chapter, affective poststructuralists have sometimes taken a position in this debate, generally siding with the systemic approach, which is also in keeping with common sense. In the following chapters, I will in general adopt a systemic account as well. The central difference in processes is between appraisal theories and what might be called “sub-appraisal” or “perceptual-associative” theories.3 As Keith Oatley summarizes, “[t]he theory of appraisal … proposes” that “[a] particular kind of emotion … is caused … by a particular concern being affected by a pattern of events that impinge on this concern” (Passionate 30). Martha Nussbaum views emotions as “judgments of value” that bear on our flourishing (see chapter one of Upheavals). Brody summarizes one view in appraisal theory, that “emotions monitor the rate of progress toward attaining important goals” (16). For example, in this view, I feel happy when my situation changes in such a way as to make the realization of important goals more likely; I feel afraid when my situation changes in such a way as to make it less likely that I will achieve my ever-present goal of avoiding pain.

50  What is emotion? Sub-appraisal theories, in contrast, locate the eliciting conditions of emotion episodes in automatic processes, such as the activation of emotional memories.4 Emotional memories are memories that revive associated emotions when activated, as when recalling a sorrowful experience revives the sorrow. These automatic processes may be triggered by appraisal, in which case appraisal is important as an indirect elicitor of emotion. But the automatic processes might also precede and provoke the appraisal or occur without appraisal. Moreover, their results need not parallel those of appraisal. For example, an emotional memory might make one sad about an event that, in terms of appraisal, should be understood as good. As Robinson puts it, “a person can make the right kind of judgment or ‘see’ things in the right way and still not respond emotionally” (Deeper 57). Though they do not typically discuss the issue in these terms, it does seem that affect theorists often adopt something along the lines of the perceptual-associative view. For example, Brian Massumi stresses that “pointing out the actual facts” does not in itself change public response to political issues such as war (“Future” 55). Dimensions and systems The fundamental question for any dimensional theory is what dimensions are needed to yield a descriptively precise and explanatorily adequate account of emotion. A standard view is articulated by Richard McNally. It involves “three orthogonal dimensions: valence (pleasant versus unpleasant), arousal (high versus low), and dominance (in control versus being controlled)” (42; see also Fontaine 120). “Arousal” is sometimes termed “activation”; “dominance” is sometimes termed “control,” “power,” or “potency.” More significantly, valence may be defined in terms of feeling (as in the quotation from McNally), or in terms of behavior—specifically, as approach versus withdrawal (see Brosch and Moors 401). A similar point holds for arousal, which may be understood as a subjective sense of excitement or a behavioral propensity toward action. Klaus Scherer and Phoebe Ellsworth note that sometimes a further dimension of unpredictability is added (“Universality” 399). For example, to be shocked by an event presumably requires that the event be aversive, out of one’s control, highly arousing, and unexpected. Even if one adopts a systemic approach, the isolation of dimensions may be fruitful. Indeed, the two approaches are not necessarily irreconcilable (cf. Hamm, Schupp, and Weike 189). Dimensions may represent common features across systems. After all, if the different

What is emotion? 51 systems are all going to count as emotions, they should have features in common. From an evolutionary perspective, as Randolph Nesse explains, “[e]motions can be arrayed on dimensions because diverse situations have certain adaptive challenges in common … Two relevant characteristics of all situations are whether they are significant or insignificant to fitness (arousal), and whether they pose threats of possible loss or offer opportunities to gain useful resources (valence)” (“Evolution” 160–161; see also Davidson 141). With respect to literature, the isolation of dimensions may sensitize us to the place of cross-emotion properties in characters or scenes. Such properties are important in part because they can affect character or reader response. Consider arousal. As Toates points out, arousal from one source may spill over into other systems. For example, “when triggers for anger are present,” then “arousal arising from an immediately preceding sexual stimulus or from physical exertion” may “contribute to anger” (168). To take a crude example, the arousal from spectacular special effects in a film may intensify the viewer’s anger at the hero’s antagonist or enthusiasm for the hero’s accomplishments. One way of thinking about the events in Romeo and Juliet, especially the violence, is in terms of the dimension of arousal. Specifically, a great deal of what happens in the play seems to result from an excess of youthful excitement. The young people in particular are worked up. Whether due to boisterous camaraderie, anger, or sexual desire, they are itching for action. As suggested by Toates, that urge to action is not confined to its original source, but affects other emotion systems as well. What began as the arousal of verbal banter in friendly rivalry may spread to more physically vigorous manifestations and, in proper circumstances, even to antagonistic violence. This is in part manifest in the dialogue of the play, as Sampson and Gregory engage in verbal sparring that may be seen as broadly parallel to rough and tumble play. It may be brought out even more fully through staging in the theater and through film techniques. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is particularly striking in its depiction of the unruly comradeship of “the boys” as they inspire one another’s rowdiness in a way that builds both their arousal and that of the audience. The other two dimensions have consequences for our understanding of the play as well. The bivalence of hedonic tone—its division into pleasurable and unpleasurable—poses a problem for anger. For the most part, we are able to divide emotions into those that are positively valenced and those that are negatively valenced. We like being happy and do not like being sad. But things seem more complex with anger. In fact, there is some reason to believe that pleasure and unpleasure

52  What is emotion? are partially independent of one another (see Rolls 15). Thus, happiness may be understood as high in pleasure and low in unpleasure. Anger, in contrast, appears to include some measure of both pleasure and unpleasure. The degree of each probably varies with both dispositional and circumstantial factors. One thing that is striking about the play is that it seems many of the characters are particularly predisposed to enjoy the feeling of anger. This may be the result of emotion masking, where the hedonic value of anger is enhanced by its difference from the unequivocally painful experience of shame. Finally, there is the variable of control. Once pointed out, it seems obvious that the play is pervaded by lack of control. There is, of course, lack of self-control in the play. But what is perhaps more important is a recurring lack of control over circumstances, and the characters’ emotional responses are often inseparable from that sense of compromised potency regarding crucial aspects of one’s life. Indeed, a recurring motif in the play concerns the absolute loss of control over eliciting conditions for emotion, thus an utter inability to alter those conditions. Faced with an aversive emotion, one needs to take some steps to alter the eliciting conditions of the emotion. When one is powerless over external circumstances, one must change oneself. But what does one do when one’s dispositions, attitudes, and stances are immutable? If one cannot change one’s subjective orientation, perhaps one’s only hope for change comes with the possibility of self-annihilation that ends any subjective orientation. In Romeo and Juliet, there is one emotion that promotes death, most often through suicide. That is the grief of attachment loss, most obviously in the cases of Romeo and Juliet, but also in the case of Lady Montague. In this play, violent suicide, as well as the more gentle self-destruction of pining away (“Grief of [her] son’s exile hath stopped her breath” [V.iii.220]) are means of doing what little one can to defy inexorable emotional pain. Again, in contrast with the dimensional view, a systems approach proposes that a number of “primary (or basic) emotions are genetically built into the human brain by natural selection” (LeDoux, Anxious 120). Silvan Tomkins, a founding theorist of basic emotions, is one of the few important influences on both affective science and affective poststructuralism. In his account, the “primary emotions” include “surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust … and anguish” (LeDoux, Anxious 120). The list is almost certainly not complete. We might add for example attachment, sexual desire, hunger, and the reward system of wanting and liking (see Chatterjee, “Neuroaesthetics” 309), among others.

What is emotion? 53 Tomkins contrasted primary emotions with “secondary emotions, such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, empathy, and so on,” which he viewed as “culturally determined” (LeDoux, Anxious 120). Tomkins’ precise division here, and its association with a biology-culture opposition, are doubtful. Empathy as a general process is as universal as disgust, and as biologically determined. Conversely, some of the elicitors of disgust are just as culturally specified as some targets of empathy. But the idea of a set of basic emotions does necessarily entail some sort of primary–secondary division—though it is perhaps better referred to as basic versus derivative or basic versus compound. Specifically, “secondary” emotions result from the integration of basic emotion systems with one another or with some sort of information. Romantic love combines attachment, sexual desire, and reward system activation (for this analysis of romantic love, see Chapter 3 of Hogan, What, and works cited therein). Remorse combines sorrow and/or disgust with a judgment that one is responsible for the grievous or disgusting act or event, which occurred in the past. Emotion systems stand in one of three relations with one another. First, one system may enhance another, as when attachment increases sexual desire. Second, one system may inhibit another, as when disgust decreases sexual desire. Finally, one system may be neutral with respect to another. For example, pride and hunger do not seem to be systematically calming or arousing of one another. It is also worth noting that enhancement and inhibition may operate in both directions or one direction but not the other. For example, physical disgust and hunger might inhibit one another, but attachment might inhibit physical disgust without being inhibited by it (on the complex relation between attachment and disgust, see my What 75n.8 and citations therein). Shakespeare combines contradictory or mutually inhibitory emotions with remarkable frequency in this play. Again, the play is characterized by mirth-provoking hijinks (e.g., punning sexual banter), but it is equally a tragedy, filled with anxiety and sorrow. It conjoins the disgust and anger of the Montagues and Capulets with the attachment bonds of the “death-marked” characters—Lady Montague, Romeo, and Juliet. The reason for these contrasts seems to be in part a matter of intensifying the audience emotions through the contrast. But there seem also to be thematic suggestions, bearing on the value of opposing love to hate. Indeed, shortly after he is introduced, Romeo speaks of the opening fight as an emotional paradox, “loving hate” (I.i.174). This meditation on contradictory emotions may sensitize us to their presence in the play. It also suggests the possible thematic point. The belligerents exhibit a “love” of hate in the sense that they

54  What is emotion? experience enjoyment in anger. But Romeo “feel[s] no love in this” battle scene, because there is nothing of the attachment feelings that would inhibit such violence—attachment feelings of just the sort he will soon develop for Juliet. Appraisal and subappraisal accounts Again, we may broadly divide emotion processing theories into appraisal theory, on the one hand, and the subappraisal or perceptual-associative accounts, on the other hand. The basic insight of appraisal theory is that events in and of themselves do not provoke emotions. It is, rather, the meaning of an event relative to some person that provokes an emotion in that person. Suppose Jones wins a particular Democratic primary leading up to a presidential election. That is not an event that produces the same emotional response in everyone. Supporters of Jones will be happy; supporters of Smith, Jones’s rival for the democratic nomination, will be disappointed; Republicans may be indifferent. As Scherer and Ellsworth summarize, “[t]he basic premise of appraisal theories is that emotions are elicited and differentiated by the subjective interpretation of the personal significance of events” (“Appraisal” 45). More precisely, Richard Lazarus emphasizes two components to appraisal: “primary appraisal,” which treats the bearing of circumstances or events on our goals, and “secondary appraisal,” which concerns our capacity to alter or sustain those circumstances or events (see, for example, Scherer, “Coping” 103). Clearly, appraisal theory captures important features of emotional response. When Romeo hears of Juliet’s death, his emotional response is a function of recognizing its consequences for himself. In effect, the death has destroyed all his future plans and simulated joys. They will not be reunited; he will never touch or speak with her or hear her voice again; he will never rest like a glove against her cheek (as he hopes early on [II.i.69–70]), nor look again into her star-like eyes (cf. II.i.60–62). Moreover, in addition to grief—and perhaps even more strongly than grief—he feels suicidal despair. That despair is inseparable from his sense that a searing agony of separation loss lies in his future and that the only way he can oppose that agony is by ending any possible subjective experience. In other words, there is clearly some sense in which he engages in a secondary appraisal and realizes that he cannot change the circumstances or his interests; he can change the emotion only by putting an end to himself. His trip to the apothecary (where he purchases poison) is the result of this realization.

What is emotion? 55 The obvious objection to appraisal theories comes from the fact that we often respond emotionally before we have a chance to reflect on the consequences of the eliciting conditions and thus before we engage in anything that we would ordinarily refer to as “appraisal.” Of course, appraisal theorists have an answer to this objection. Matsumoto and Ekman explain that “an appraisal process” may be “immediate, unbidden, opaque, unconscious, and automatic” (70). They explain it in terms of schema matching. For instance, “[t]he perception of the smell of faeces may match the schema of contamination in the emotion schema database, triggering the emotion of disgust” (70). But here one wonders why this is a schema of contamination. The emotional association at issue seems much simpler. It seems to be a matter of associating the target with other things that are already disgusting. For example, test subjects often react with disgust to brownies formed into the shape of feces (see Nussbaum, Upheavals 204). They know perfectly well that the brownies are not a source of contamination, but they nonetheless respond with disgust. In keeping with this, Jan de Houwer observes that “processing of stimulus valence can occur automatically in the sense of unintentionally, quickly, goal-independently, efficiently, and unconsciously” (315). If such processing genuinely occurs “goal-independently,” it would seem that it does not involve appraisal, except in the trivial or circular sense where “appraisal” simply means “establishing stimulus valence.” Beyond these points, there appear to be areas of emotional response that have little to do with appraisal in any usual sense. Thus Jenefer Robinson notes that “music—or at least ‘pure’ music without accompanying words—presents special problems for the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion. If a cognitive appraisal of loss is necessary for sadness, and of potential threat is necessary for anxiety, then how can music all by itself arouse these emotions? Yet there is lots of empirical evidence that ‘pure’ music can arouse at least sadness, happiness, anxiety, and tranquillity in listeners” (“Aesthetic” 7). Similarly, Juslin comments that “music would not appear to have any capacity to further or block life goals” (270). In keeping with these points, Klaus Scherer observes that “the process of … appraisal can occur at different levels of processing,” including “simple sensorimotor links or primitive associations,” as well as “conscious and unconscious schemata” and “effortful propositional analysis” (“Emotion Theories” 147). This, however, raises two questions. First, what is the meaning of “appraisal” if it includes “simple sensorimotor links” and “primitive associations”? If these are forms of appraisal, then appraisal appears to mean nothing more than the

56  What is emotion? integration of circumstances with subjective conditions, which everyone agrees is a necessary condition for emotion. The second question is, just what is common to these various processes—“primitive associations,” “conscious and unconscious schemata,” and so on? These appear to be different operations, but they presumably share something that makes them all causes of emotion. Another way of putting the problem is as follows. Emotions are presumably evolved systems in the human mind and brain. As Randolph Nesse explains, “The most fundamental distinction in biology is between proximate and evolutionary explanations. Proximate explanations are about a trait’s mechanism … One can think of the evolutionary explanation as the ‘function’ that the trait serves” (“Evolutionary” 158–159). As biological phenomena, emotions must involve causal mechanisms, step-by-step processes leading from initial conditions to outcomes. At the same time, as the products of evolution, these mechanisms must approximate certain functions, which is to say, they must operate to satisfy evolutionary imperatives more successfully than available alternatives. Simply put, the mechanisms of emotional response must serve to enhance reproduction. As Stanislas Dehaene put it, “[e]volved organs are not designed ‘for’ their function; they merely grant their possessor a reproductive advantage” (90). One might argue that appraisal theory gives us the function, not the mechanisms. In other words, emotions are not produced by appraisals. Rather, they are produced by mechanisms that approximate the function of serving to advance goals, prominently including the goals of staying alive, eating, reproducing, establishing social status, avoiding pain, and so on. In other words, the mechanisms approximate the functions that would be manifest in rational appraisals. But what, then, are the mechanisms at issue? Juslin gives a hint regarding music when he writes that, “[f]ollowing Darwin … it has been suggested that vocal expression and musical expression share a common code, based on emotion-related physiological effects on the voice … Empirical evidence tends to support this hypothesis” (269; see also Zammuner 351 and Gabrielsson and Juslin 507). In this case, the vocal expression is already established as having emotional consequences—the communication of fear, grief, joy, and so forth. Thus the emotional effects of music may result in part from its similarity to or association with vocal expressions. This sort of interpretation is central to perceptual-associative accounts of emotion. Such accounts link emotional response with concrete, perceptual conditions—including simulated (or imagined) conditions—and associations or memories.

What is emotion? 57 For example, in the perceptual-associative account developed in my What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion, there are three sources of emotion: (1) Innate sensitivities: These include innate responses to certain expressive outcomes of other people’s emotion episodes. As LeDoux explains, “[e]ach species is innately prepared to treat certain stimuli as threatening. Innate/prepared threats include pictures of people with facial expressions of anger or fear, or pictures of venomous animals like snakes and spiders” (Anxious 203). (2) Critical period developments: Emotion systems achieve basic organizational features through early developmental processes and experiences. For example, whether one’s attachment bonding tends to be secure or insecure is largely established through childhood experiences. In keeping with this, Abraham Buunk notes that “[j]ealousy has been found to be more pronounced in individuals with an anxious ambivalent attachment style” (229). (3) Emotional memories: Emotional memories are memories that, when activated, produce the related emotions, whether or not these are relevant to current circumstances (see Buchanan and Adolphs 43 on different senses of “emotional memory”). Of course, appraisal accounts clearly do tell us something about emotional response, in life and in literature (for a detailed, illuminating treatment of a literary work in terms of appraisal theory, see Lalita Hogan, “Prophesying”). Thus it is important to preserve the insights of appraisal theory in any alternative. As indicated briefly above, in a perceptual-associative account, appraisal processes may elicit emotions. However, they do so indirectly. Evaluating an event in relation to one’s goals involves direct perception, concrete imagination of precedents and outcomes, and the activation of emotional memories. In a perceptual-associative account, it is these results of appraisal that foster emotional response, not the appraisal itself. This helps to explain why one’s appraisal processes may guide one’s emotional response. However, they may also diverge from that response. A person may reach one conclusion in appraisal (e.g., that a target is not dangerous) while his or her actual emotional response to the target is quite different (e.g., fear; cf. Jacobson 361; Han and Lerner 112; Loewenstein and Rick 132). In cases of divergence, the appraisal conclusion derives from the logic of the propositions, while the emotion itself results from the perceptions, imaginations, and so on. For example, “if my selfreassurances that the gun is not loaded are repeatedly shoved aside by images of weapons discharging or the gruesome aftermaths of shootings, I will experience fear despite my firm conviction about the gun’s harmlessness” (Lengbeyer 75).

58  What is emotion? We might briefly illustrate the difference between appraisal and subappraisal theories—as well as their inter-relation—by considering a potential problem in the plot of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet experience “love at first sight” with unusual strength and urgency. This is understandable “externally” as part of the emotional intensification that characterizes literary works and makes them engaging for audience members. To some extent, it does not require further “internal” explanation (explanation in terms of the storyworld itself). We might, for example, simply assume that the intensity of the lovers’ response here is just a function of the impulsiveness of youth, at least as it occurs within the fiction of Romeo and Juliet. But the relationship seems to go beyond mere impulsiveness. Though they barely have any acquaintance, Juliet in effect initiates marriage negotiations. Due to the play’s familiarity, as well as the distracting beauty of the dialogue and other factors, audience members may pass over this oddity without remark. However, on reflection, it appears almost bizarre. Juliet herself explains that any swearing of love between the two is “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” (II.i.169). She recognizes that the feelings that they have are like “lightning,” which illuminates the landscape only to “cease” almost immediately (II.i.170). Romeo too recognizes that the ties of affection that might bind them are too thin and tenuous; “all this is but a dream,” he thinks, “[t]oo flattering-sweet to be substantial” (II.i.191–192). Juliet reflects on the importance of waiting for future interactions. Their feelings are merely a “bud,” and they need to wait to see if it has grown into “a beauteous flower when next we meet” (II.i.172–173). Yet, only a moment later, Juliet delivers the unexpected lines, “If that thy bent of love be honourable, /Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow” (II.i.194–195). How are we to account for this change from stating the importance of delay to asserting the necessity of immediate commitment? The first thing to note here is that both the caution about commitment and the desire for commitment are largely a matter of motivational or emotional response. Specifically, both involve some degree of apprehension—thus an activation of the fear system—and a corresponding impulse to modulate strong feelings of love, principally sexual desire. As with much modulation, this is based on the contrast between short- and long-term goals and outcomes. Romeo’s worry over whether this is all “a dream” (II.i.191) betrays apprehension about disappointment, perhaps worry over subsequent rejection, with Juliet potentially playing the role of Rosaline. Indeed, Romeo prefaces this concern with the explicit statement, “I am afeard” (II.i.190).

What is emotion? 59 Juliet’s worry is more fully elaborated, deeper, and more consequential. She is so distraught that she has “no joy of this contract tonight” (II.i.168). From an appraisal perspective the sequence of events is initially straightforward. Sticking with Juliet’s case, it seems that Juliet evaluates her situation as potentially advancing her goals for the achievement of romantic love, including both companionship and sexual gratification. But she recognizes that the situation has ruinous potential as well. Should she succumb to her sexual impulses, she could end up pregnant and abandoned. Thus she evaluates the situation as having different possible outcomes, which produce ambivalence. She then engages in “secondary appraisal,” the process by which one assesses the possibilities for response to the situation. The obvious response is simply to defer sexual gratification, to await a later meeting when the future of the relationship might be ascertainable with greater certainty. That is her first inclination. However, she quickly shifts to the second obvious alternative, assuring marriage. Deferral and definitive commitment (through marriage) are the clearest ways of responding to the threat of abandonment. In this respect, Juliet is following through on the options available through secondary appraisal. This leaves open the question of just why she chooses the option of marriage. If she is worried that the love may be as fleeting as lightning, then it would seem rash to choose the marriage option. A long future of loveless marriage does not appear to be the best choice. Of course, appraisal theory does not claim that all appraisals are rational or in the best interest of the person experiencing the emotion. Nonetheless, it would seem odd to appraise the risk of losing love as significant, then to positively appraise commitment to such uncertain love. Here, we might switch to a perceptual-associative account. The first thing to note here is that all the appraisal considerations reapply in a sub-appraisal account, but with a difference. In the case of the sub-appraisal account, the aversive effects bear not on the statistical possibility and objective undesirability of Juliet becoming an unwed mother. They derive, rather, from Juliet’s painful simulation of just what it would be like to be an unwed mother, as well as her emotional memories of witnessing the misery of unwed mothers, other emotional memories of alienating her parents, and so forth. Similarly, the sexual desire that pushes her toward hurrying union with Romeo is a matter of perception of Romeo’s alluring features as well as fantasy (a form of simulation) regarding those features and regarding sexual acts. This already alters the situation. It makes Juliet’s wavering arguably more plausible, because her feelings are dissociated from the logic

60  What is emotion? of her inferences and are merely a matter of ambivalence caused by ­emotionally complex memories and simulations. But why does she resolve on marriage rather than on postponement? Here we might treat Juliet as a fully real person, with a complete biography, and conjecture an underlying psychological cause for this change from caution to precipitous marital commitment. Her behavior would at least be consistent with a certain sort of attachment insecurity that leads her to seek ironclad assurance that the bond will remain intact—the sort of thing at least superficially guaranteed by marriage. In a perceptual-associative account, that insecurity is not a matter of appraisal. It must therefore be a matter of innate predispositions, critical period experiences, or emotional memories. As it turns out, Shakespeare gives us a glimpse of Juliet’s early attachment bonding, along with one key event in the trajectory of that bonding. Indeed, it is surprising and suggestive that Shakespeare gives us this information. Specifically, he informs us through Juliet’s Nurse of just when Juliet was weaned. Since weaning marks a separation of the child from the caregiver, this may be a crucial event in the child’s development of an attachment orientation. It is always distressing. But in Juliet’s case it would have been more deeply disturbing because “upon that day” (I.iii.25) when she was weaned, “the earthquake” struck (I.iii.23). The conjunction would have associated attachment separation with catastrophe in Juliet’s mind—not because she in any usual sense believed that there would be such a conjunction of separation and disaster, but because any hint of attachment loss would be likely to provoke the anxiety first occasioned during that experience. To make matters worse, Juliet’s other attachment objects, her mother and father, were away in Mantua (I.iii.27), further chaining attachment separation with catastrophe in Juliet’s mind. This would seem to go at least some way toward explaining Juliet’s apparently rash commitment to marriage, just after she had recognized that waiting for future developments was the most prudent course. On the other hand, it may be that the appraisal account could be made more adequate to the explanation by changing some of the premises. Specifically, it may be that we need to alter our way of thinking about appraisal processes in the social context of Shakespeare’s time and place. In other words, cultural and historical differences may affect how appraisal takes place and just what emotions it entails. Clearly, Juliet’s situation is different from that of teenagers in twentyfirst century America. The point applies to the perceptual-associative account as well, since critical period experiences and emotional

What is emotion? 61 memories might vary systematically in the two cases. This leads us to the topic of Chapter 4—affective historicism.

Notes 1 As with other aspects of affect, writers from outside affective science treat mood differently (see, for example, Hatzimoysis and Ratcliffe). 2 Damasio’s theory has been disputed within affective science; on some problems with this theory, see Rolls 28–29. 3 Some theories also combine the two, as seems to be the case with Prinz’s “embodied appraisals” (see Gut 52–78). 4 The division is sometimes obscured by the fact that some sub-appraisal theorists use the word “appraisal” for automatic, non-cognitive processes.

4 Authors (I) Affective historicism

We ended the preceding chapter with a brief suggestion of some ways historical and cultural differences might affect emotion. As noted at the end of that chapter, this leads us to the topic of what might be called “affective historicism,” the view that emotions are not uniform across time periods but in some sense change historically, along with the related view that emotions are not uniform across cultures but vary culturally. It may be surprising to some readers that I have chosen to treat these topics under the narratological rubric of authorship. It might seem more intuitive to class historical and cultural “construction” in the category of readership. This is certainly one possible, indeed one valuable approach. It bears on the history of reception of a work. For instance, we may be interested in the differences between the reception of The Merchant of Venice in different centuries and in different societies. In treating that reception, we would certainly wish to focus on the cultural and historical context in which that response took place. However, suppose we conceive of our interest as being in “the work itself.” A reader-oriented critic might say, “Then we look at the original readership and its social and cultural context.” There are, however, at least two problems with this response. First, why do we choose the “original” audience? Presumably it is because the work was composed at a particular time and place. But that spatial and temporal location is set, not by the audience; rather, it is fixed by reference to the author. The second problem with focusing on the initial audience is that, as a matter of fact, the initial audience response is limited and often recognizable, in retrospect, as misguided. As Hans Robert Jauss would put it, a new work might be very distant from the horizons of expectation held by a contemporary readership. It may take decades or even centuries for the complexities and nuances of a work to become accessible to a readership. This does not mean that the author is removed

Authors (I) 63 from the culture or historical period. However, it does mean that the author may make use of historically and culturally defined principles and practices in ways that are subtle; he or she may manifest the patterns of his or her cultural and historical moment in ways that are more nuanced than is immediately obvious to contemporary readers, and his or her work may instantiate unusual variants on cultural and historical themes. Indeed, it is precisely such subtlety, nuance, and variability that inspire the interpretive efforts of critics, as well as the appreciative efforts of teachers. On the other hand, the attention to authorship is commonly understood as more particular to a biographical person. The present chapter treats social issues bearing on authorship, the author and his or her work as situated at a specific cultural and historical nexus. Particularity will of course enter here, but the stress is on what is common, not on what is unique. We will turn to individual, authorial uniqueness in the following chapter, which treats expressivism.

Affective historicism (I): The history of emotions and cultural constructivism As practiced in literary study, affective historicism is, first of all, a matter of uncovering a history of emotions, in part derived from literary works and in part applied to those works. The history of emotions encompasses a range of distinct historical and psychological hypotheses, often differing in their degree of adherence to cultural constructivism, the idea that emotions are not pre-given biologically but “constructed” by cultures. It might initially seem that the entire project of a history of emotions presupposes cultural constructivism. That is to some degree true. But, again, the degree of such constructivism varies considerably. Indeed, Konstan remarks that “history of emotion is … a site at which constructivist and universalist … theories of emotion may fruitfully intersect” (206). An overview of cultural constructivist ideas on emotion is clearly beyond the scope of the present book. (The topic is well covered by other writers; for a valuable account, with an orientation different from that of the present volume, see Plamper.) Some hold positions that deny almost any continuity to the contour of emotion events across cultures and historical periods. For theorists of this sort, there is, for example, almost no connection between Renaissance cases of melancholy and current cases of depression. The link is tenuous even between Renaissance cases of anger or joy and current cases of emotions with the same names. A more moderate view is that “emotion

64  Authors (I) language”—or emotion culture more generally—“plays a role in ­creating or transforming emotional experience, as opposed to merely representing it” (Soriano and Ogarkova 242). Of course, one should not assume that a change in terminology entails a change in facts. People did not begin dying of cancer only after the word “cancer” came to name a disease. On the other hand, there is often some relation between the cultural conception of a given phenomenon and the way that phenomenon develops. Even in the case of cancer, a diagnosis of cancer is likely to produce physiological reactions in the patient, and those physiological reactions may have consequences that affect the course of the disease. The point is even more obvious in the case of emotion; indeed, the example of cancer response is itself largely a matter of emotion. In keeping with these points, Soriano and Ogarkova observe that “the potential for conceptual representation of emotion is likely to go beyond what salient categories language provides us with; but linguistic differences bias towards preferred, default ways of categorizing and processing emotional reality in a linguistic community” (242). In short, things are not simple. We cannot assume either continuity or difference. This obviously raises the issue of what exactly does change historically or culturally in an emotion episode, and what is the extent of the change. Though the history of emotions and the cultural construction of emotions are widely discussed and analyzed, they do not appear to have been subjected to the systematic treatment that affective science in principle allows. However, before turning to the issue of just what can change in an emotion episode and how, we should briefly consider the idea of social construction. In other words, before we take up the topic of what is “constructed” in emotion, we should have a better idea of what it means to culturally construct emotion or anything else. The first thing to note about social construction is that it is often used ambiguously between common belief or ideology and socially shaped facts. For example, suppose one makes the claim that female emotionality and male stoicism are “socially constructed.” This could mean that women are more emotional and men are more stoical, though this results from training rather than from innate propensities. However, it could also mean that there is no such difference; there is only a social ideology that falsely leads people to believe that women are more emotional and men are more stoical. Even among facts, “construction” is often used ambiguously for circumstantial inclinations and propensities that result from socialization. As, for example, Cordelia Fine has shown in detail, there are many differences between

Authors (I) 65 men and women that result from the different circumstances in which they find themselves. For instance, men become no less empathic than women if they are simply placed in circumstances in which empathy is valued (see Fine 21). Finally, even socialization is inadequately specific, for it fails to distinguish between alterable preferences or habits and deeply engrained orientations, what we might call shallow and deep socialization. Put differently, the idea of cultural construction tends to conceal crucial distinctions in emotional response. These distinctions are wellcaptured by the preceding account of the sources of emotion. First, falling outside of social construction are the innate tendencies, including specific sensitivities and prepared responses. The nature and extent of these propensities is of course an empirical issue. But it is hardly possible that there are none. Turning to cultural construction, we find deep socialization in critical period experiences. This is an area in which there may be significant cultural or historical differences in emotion, at least in the social distribution of types for any given emotion category. For example, changes in parenting styles are likely to affect the “attachment styles”—the patterns in bonding response— found in a given society. The available styles themselves seem unlikely to change. For example, a fundamental parameter is secure versus insecure. These parametric alternatives are likely to be important both cross-culturally and trans-historically. However, cultural or historical differences in parenting styles are likely to change the proportion of secure and insecure attachment styles in a given society. Shallow socialization is the development of emotional inclinations on the basis of emotional memories or cognitive processes that bias one’s emotional response. This is highly changeable. However, much of that change is a matter of idiosyncratic experience, a topic for biography and expressivism rather than historiography and affective culturalism. A given author will develop, for example, specific political attitudes based in part on his or her individual experiences. To take one case, James Joyce’s feelings about Charles Stewart Parnell were inseparable from specific emotional memories bearing not only on Parnell himself, but on members of Joyce’s family and their emotional responses to Parnell’s political fall and subsequent death. On the other hand, there are patterns here. The fall of Parnell was a public event that affected many people in similar (though far from identical) ways. To take a more current example, Americans share emotional memories of the violence on September 11, 2001. Again, not all reactions were the same. But they tended to fall into rough patterns. Such emotional memories can be very consequential and enduring; however,

66  Authors (I) they usually do not produce the often nearly irreversible emotional structures formed by critical period experiences. Put somewhat oversimply, if we leave aside cases of trauma, xenophobia based on emotional memories of September 11 should be considerably less indelible than xenophobia based on early childhood socialization. Finally, circumstances obviously change all the time. These too can be idiosyncratic or socially patterned. For example, there were undoubtedly emotional differences between blacks and whites in times and places where blacks were slaves, owned principally by whites. Circumstances range from such profound matters as legal status to such apparently superficial but often consequential matters as clothing. (Again, beyond circumstances, there are false, ideologically functional claims, which do not require any special psychological account.) Before turning to emotion episodes and historical change, I should note one further point about cultural construction. It is common to believe that the division between universal and culturally relative is isomorphic with the division between biological and socially constructed. This presumption is, however, mistaken. First, there is biological variation (e.g., in empathic sensitivity)—though it seems very unlikely that there is any significant emotion system variation across historical periods or cultures. Second, and more importantly, societies may develop the same patterns for reasons of practical utility in the material world, due to principles of group dynamics, in consequence of cross-cultural issues in childrearing, or as the result of other nonbiological factors. This may be particularly important in the study of emotion and literature; for example, many literary universals are a function of emotion processes, but are almost certainly not innate themselves or a direct expression of biological patterns.

Affective historicism (II): Emotion episodes As is probably already clear from the preceding chapters, I begin from the premise that human beings share the same basic emotion structures and processes. These include the same types of emotion systems, with the same possible sub-types of emotions and the same possible combinations of emotions. Moreover, I take it that the components and structure of emotion episodes are constant across times and societies. Thus, emotion episodes always include eliciting conditions (both circumstantial and dispositional), actional outcomes, communicative outcomes, modulatory processes, and so on. At the same time, I take it that any of these components may vary to some extent—though some components (most obviously, physiological outcomes) are less

Authors (I) 67 malleable than others. Clearly, circumstances change. In addition, dispositions may vary in those aspects that are defined through critical period experiences or emotional memories, as well as associated cognitive routines (including motor routines). Indeed, affective historicism may be understood as the study of how components of an emotion episode—eliciting conditions, expressive outcomes, and so on—may undergo systematic social variation. For example, circumstantial eliciting conditions vary in obvious ways. Fear of nuclear war is something that simply could not occur before the modern period. On the other hand, it seems likely that there are no new categories of emotion elicitor. Long before the advent of nuclear weapons, people had a fear of massive, worldly destruction, whether through total war or divine apocalypse. The precise nature and extent of those fears changed historically. But even then they seem likely to have changed for the same types of reasons—from political manipulation to random factors that generate a cascade of communal worry at some “tipping point” in a network (e.g., once a certain, minimum number of people have a particular fear, that fear spreads automatically through emotion contagion). The means and extent of these factors change—from manipulation by village elders to manipulation by national politicians; from face-to-face emotion contagion to contagion produced through Facebook postings. Nonetheless, the basic processes remain the same. Of course, the differences in these cases are not inconsequential. Their significance, however, tends to vary with the context in which they are considered. It may not make much psychological difference if contagion is spread through physical presence or via a computer screen or smartphone. But it does make a political difference, since the speed and extent of contagion may be much greater in the second case. Parallel points hold for the other components of an emotion episode. Dispositional eliciting conditions seem likely to be of the same broad kinds (or to cover the same range of alternatives). However, social factors may alter the distribution of such dispositions, as when parenting practices foster greater numbers of secure or insecure attachment relations. The point may have grave consequences. For example, small changes in the proportion of people with a disposition to find out-group members disgusting might contribute to social acquiescence in or even advocacy of ethnic cleansing. An obvious area in which eliciting conditions vary historically is sexual desire and romantic love (which combines sexual desire with attachment feelings). Societies such as the contemporary United States have regularized dating practices where, even in early adolescence,

68  Authors (I) limited sexual contact (e.g., kissing) is permitted, even encouraged, short of actual intercourse. At least when I was growing up, there were two sorts of relevant social regulation. First, there were norms governing the kinds of sexual contact that were permissible. Second, even those forms of contact were in principle confined to certain times and places (e.g., a kiss when saying goodnight). This is of course not to say that other sorts of sexual contact did not occur. They most certainly did. But the social structure fostered norms and associated practices against which other forms of sexual contact could be judged and in relation to which they could be developed. Moreover, there was a surprising degree of polyamory in this norm. We were discouraged from becoming too attached to any one person or “going steady” at too young an age. A system of this sort does not change the fundamental emotion systems and processes involved in sexual desire or romantic love. However, it almost certainly alters one’s exposure to circumstantial elicitors of desire and attachment and alters one’s own dispositions in any given case. The precise nature of the alteration is difficult to predict. But it seems clear that there will be some difference between a society with a regularized dating system (including, for example, “mixers” organized by one’s school), a society with some relatively non-systematic cross-sex interaction within a basically sex-segregated system, and a society where male-female interaction is almost entirely confined to close relatives and a parentally chosen spouse. In reading a work such as Romeo and Juliet, it is important to recognize both the continuities with and differences from our system. The continuities include some striking parallels between many current high school experiences and the ways in which the lovers meet and interact at the Capulets’ party. But the differences are at least as important. Romeo’s direct interactions with young women and Juliet’s interactions with young men were limited. They had not become habituated to such interactions, but found them physiologically and emotionally arousing in a way that seems less likely today, with co-education and the more systematic mixing of boys and girls from an early age. The point has consequences for behavior as well. Actional outcomes aim at sustaining a pleasant situation or altering an aversive one. That sustaining or altering is largely a matter of approach or withdrawal. However, the modes of approach and withdrawal obviously change. A friend request on Facebook is a form of approach; hopping into one’s car and driving off is a mode of withdrawal. Neither was available at Shakespeare’s time. Such differences may be trivial or consequential. Take the case of Romeo under Juliet’s window. To put it a bit crudely, even if the families had gotten along, he could hardly have invited

Authors (I) 69 her for a movie and pizza the following weekend. In fact, they both seem somewhat baffled as to what they might do next. They both wish to enhance and intensify the experience of desire and (nascent) love through approach. But their social system seems to leave them with few opportunities for approach other than actual sexual relations. In terms of social institutions, the obvious possibility is marriage (rather than the sock hop or a malted at the corner dairy bar). But the actional outcomes for marriage involved the prospective groom approaching the prospective bride’s father, as illustrated by Paris—an impossible alternative in this case. All this leads to Juliet’s precipitous question about marriage, and her means of finding the answer to that question—not approaching Romeo herself, but dispatching her nurse to undertake the task. As the preceding case illustrates, actional outcomes—and indeed eliciting conditions—are inseparable from the elaboration of causes and possible consequences that are part of the simulation accompanying any emotional response. These too vary historically and culturally, while following the same basic principles of intuitive causality— encompassing folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics, the intuitive ways in which we understand and explain causes and effects (e.g., by appeal to beliefs and desires in the case of folk psychology). To some extent, simulation is constrained by ideology, as when someone cannot imagine a member of a different racial group to be his or her own equal or superior (as may be the case with Iago and Othello). In other cases, constraints on simulation are realistic and practical. In Romeo and Juliet, practical constraints are well-illustrated by Juliet’s unwillingness to relieve the “so unsatisfied” Romeo on the evening they first meet. Presumably, she is tacitly aware of the possible consequences of such a transgression. Premarital sexual relations at the time were relatively common: Martin Ingram explains that “at least a fifth of all brides in Shakespearian England were pregnant when they came to be married in church” (122). But preachers often advocated dire punishments for premarital relations. For example, the Puritan writer Philip Stubbes urged the death penalty for fornication (Ingram 123). Moreover, given the Capulets’ tendency toward choler, Juliet might expect harsh treatment from her parents were such relations uncovered even without pregnancy. Ideological constraints enter here as well. Indeed, they are in effect foregrounded by their temporary abeyance. Both Romeo and Juliet express shock that they have allowed themselves to fall in love with one of their familial enemies. The difficulty is that they failed to categorize each other early enough to produce what is sometimes called “discounting,” the dismissal

70  Authors (I) of a class of persons as possible targets of certain sorts of emotion. Alternatively, one could say that each failed to realize that the other did not satisfy a key provision on the “unconscious list of traits” that constitutes one’s “love template,” as Fisher would say (102). That discounting operates to some extent through inhibitions on simulation, constraints on romantic or sexual imaginations of the other person. The preceding cases involve not only simulation, but also a form of modulation. Unsurprisingly, here again we find common human processes that are specified culturally and historically. Modulation is always a matter of increasing, sustaining, or diminishing the intensity of other emotion components to the extent that these are in one’s control. For instance, one may diminish the impact of circumstantial eliciting conditions by diverting one’s attention or simply leaving the situation. One may diminish communicative outcomes by altering one’s facial expression. One important form of modulation is rationalization. One is likely to engage in rationalization when faced with emotional conflict, such as a conflict between emotions bearing on pleasure or acquisition (e.g., lust or greed) and emotions bearing on self-esteem. Any sort of modulation may vary culturally and historically. But some of the most interesting cases may involve the social determination of just what constitutes a conflict and thus what necessitates rationalization, as norms governing emotions change. Consider, for example, emotion expressions. Social disapproval of emotions is likely to work its way out in social disgust over the expression or enactment of those emotions, as in repulsion at the unmasculine sight of a man in tears. In consequence, such expression or enactment would foster shame on the part of the person experiencing the emotion (e.g., the man who is weeping). Rationalization would operate principally to reduce the shame while the actual suppression of emotion expression (i.e., adherence to social “display rules”) would serve to fend off exposure to others’ disgust. Though emotion history might in principle treat any component of an emotion episode, it has often devoted particular attention to modulation (see Plamper 49–50). A common theme is the idea that emotion modulation has increased in the course of history, with the relatively free emotionality of past societies gradually shaped into the more disciplined stoicism of modern times. Perhaps the most widely known analysis of this sort has been developed by Steven Pinker. But the claim may be overly simple, ignoring for example the variety of modulations that characterize different societies at different times: e.g., in some contexts, a society may foster modulatory enhancement of anger and violence, rather than inhibition.

Authors (I) 71 In any case, changes in modulation are certainly important. In examining Romeo and Juliet, we might reasonably ask what forms of social regulation are in place that foster certain sorts of modulation; what forms of regulation have been discarded, allowing freer expression of emotion in the play; and, perhaps most important, what forms of regulation were contested at the time, such that there was not adequate social agreement on their importance. At least as a naïve reader of the play, one is likely to get the sense that Shakespeare’s society was sometimes quite happy with the uninhibited expression of sexuality, but also quite censorious of adolescent desire, at least insofar as it manifested itself in willfulness. This may suggest that the modulation of sexuality was an area of contested social norms. In a general way, disagreements over modulating sexual desire are probably characteristic of all times and places. The issue is the precise way in which that modulation is developed and specified in such contestation. Modulation is of course inseparable from the establishment of social norms governing the experience, expression, and enactment of emotions. This too has been a prominent topic in the history of emotions, though it is often spoken of narrowly as a matter of expression only. Thus, Plamper stresses the value of examining “the regulatory apparatus that governed the expression of feelings in society as a whole, or its elemental social groups” (57). It seems reasonable to add actional outcomes or behaviors, and perhaps even the experience of emotions here. A society that despises lust does not merely despise leering; it despises sexual pursuit and even the desire itself. Of course, in some cases, it might be the expression alone that is the target of regulation. For example, Konstan remarks that “[a]ttitudes toward expressions of grief and weeping (male and female) have … varied considerably” (207). Adjuring stoicism in the expression of grief would not necessarily entail valuing the absence of feeling. Indeed, in cases of this sort, one imagines that admiration for the suppression of feeling would increase to the extent that the felt intensity of grief increased as well. As this suggests, it is important to be clear about just which components of an emotion episode are valued or repudiated in a given society or societal sub-group. One concept that is potentially useful in understanding emotional value is Barbara Rosenwein’s idea of emotional communities. As Plamper explains, “emotional communities are groups of persons who share the same norms regarding the expression of feelings, valuing the same feelings (or not)” (Plamper 68). Again, the key point here does not seem confined to expression. It is, rather, a matter of evaluations that range across a broader array of emotion episode components. We

72  Authors (I) have already seen that an idea of this sort—Ahmed’s affect aliens— may be productive in political analysis and critique. A related concept has been developed and extended by writers in literary study, some of whom have considered the more complex relation between emotion norms and scripts. Scripts are the cognitive structures that define standard ways in which certain types of events unfold. Emotion scripts most obviously organize our simulation of the antecedents and consequences of some emotional event. However, they have other functions as well—behavioral, evaluative, and so on. For example, there may be alternative scripts for any given emotion, or for closely related components of emotion (such as eliciting conditions), and these may involve different evaluations or entail different trajectories for the emotion episode. Consider Frederika Bain’s analysis of different scripts related to killing or taking human life. Bain examines “early modern depictions of execution and murder.” The two forms of taking life—one (execution) socially accepted, the other (murder) socially rejected—are inseparable from emotion. Bain explains that “[t]he usual relative lack of emotion, and the stylized nature of those emotions shown, demonstrate the appropriateness of the execution and thus by extension the legitimacy of the ruler who has commanded it. Conversely, in a killing—a murder, not an execution—ordered by one characterized as a tyrant or usurper, strong or inappropriate emotion is often expressed by those who order, witness and undergo it” (221). The key differentiating feature here seems to be modulation. In keeping with a long tradition, extending back at least to Plato, the emotions are understood as potentially unruly. As such, they need to be controlled in their expressive and actional outcomes. Such control involves dispassionate consideration of alternatives along with an attempt to confine behavior to socially legitimate agents (e.g., monarchs and official executioners) and legitimate actions (e.g., “hanging for the base, beheading for the elite” [Greenblatt]). Bain’s point applies most obviously to political dramas, such as Shakespeare’s history plays. But it is not without implications for Romeo and Juliet. Tybalt’s irrational rage against Romeo is part of what makes his killing of Mercutio a damnable murder. Readers today have a sense of this in any case. However, the historical and affective context provided by Bain renders the entire sequence more complex. The sympathetic Mercutio evidences anger as well, suggesting a proneness to murder, thus partial culpability. In Aristotelian terms, his inadequately modulated anger constitutes a tragic flaw. This, in turn, makes sense of his suffering. It is tragic because he was culpable, though his

Authors (I) 73 “punishment” far outweighs the initial crime. A similar point applies to Romeo. Unlike Mercutio, he commits murder. However, the circumstances are more extenuating in the sense that the intensity of the anger was vastly greater, thus much more difficult to modulate. Of the three friends, only Benvolio appeals to the constraints of law and associated emotion modulation. This is brought out in his urging Mercutio and Tybalt to “withdraw unto some private place,/Or reason coldly of your grievances” (III.i.48–49). It is worth considering what Benvolio’s advice entails. Both alternatives urge delay, an interruption in the circuit of emotional response. Whether Shakespeare realized it or not, neither actually pits emotion against reason as such. Rather, both pit an unmodulated and univocal emotional response against responses that involve more complex and ambivalent emotions. The former in effect asks the pair to simulate the consequences of public conflict—a simulation with fearful consequences, as Prince Escalus has decreed the death penalty for disturbances of the peace (I.i.92–93). The second alternative is more encompassing. It urges, albeit indirectly, engagement with a more wide-ranging set of memories and simulations—the non-precipitous consideration of grievances. Of course, this takes us away from the historical specificity of the passage. But, in doing so, it suggests one reason why some historical particulars continue to elicit emotions in audiences today—they instantiate broader, human principles that are not historically relative. If this were not the case, we would not respond as we do to Romeo and Juliet. Affective historicists tend not to focus attention on such underlying universals. Indeed, in treating Benvolio’s advocacy of cold reason, they would be likely to stress how my construal of the advice occludes the historical opposition between reason and passion, how (in contrast with Shakespeare) I am adopting a very twenty-first century view of the rationality of emotions. In fact, however, I am not doing that. I do not believe emotions are either rational or irrational. They are motivational, whereas reason operates on information-processing. Nonetheless, the historicists would have a point in claiming that I am explicating Benvolio’s comments in a way that Shakespeare would not have understood or accepted (at least initially). This is in part because he would have been influenced by ideas about emotion and reason at the time. In keeping with this, literary historicists are particularly attentive to the theories or philosophies that surround and subsume the literary depiction of particulars. For example, in important and influential work, Gail Kern Paster has argued for the value of understanding Renaissance representations

74  Authors (I) of emotion in relation to medical theories at the time, prominently including the theory of the four humors. In the scene we have been considering, for instance, Tybalt manifests his usual “unruly spleen” (III.i.158). Its unruly character is the fault of Tybalt’s lack of modulation, a lack implicitly analogized to a disobedient subject who will not conform to the will of his sovereign—precisely Tybalt’s condition in breaching the peace. In terms of affective historicism, an analysis of this analogy could lead us to think about the implications for political economy of early modern affective values—the ways in which an advocacy of attenuating one’s emotions may be recruited to an ideology of submitting to one’s monarch or other political authorities. The idea of spleen, however, takes us from modulation into theories of emotion as such. There is clearly a connection between Shakespeare’s representation of Tybalt and Renaissance theories of emotion. Nonetheless, it is difficult to say just what we learn by linking Tybalt’s rancorous hate with spleen. Spleen was associated with melancholy (see Paster, Humoring 24, 47, and 97). But Tybalt’s emotional response seems much better understood as a combination of out-group disgust, personal shame, and rage over that shame. He appears to feel that Romeo’s uninvited presence at the Capulets’ party constituted an insult to the masculine honor of his family, and he seems humiliated by the restraint placed on him by Capulet. In short, it might be argued, on the basis of the play itself, that the historical theory of spleen is at best irrelevant in understanding Tybalt, and very likely even misleading. Indeed, as already noted, there are problems with moving from theories to facts. My doctor’s theory of what is ailing me does not determine that ailment, even if I believe him. Sometimes he is just mistaken and the therapy does not work. The same point holds for theories from earlier historical periods. (It holds even for one’s labeling of one’s own emotion in one’s first language, as Robinson has argued convincingly [Deeper 79–86].) On the other hand, theories often can affect psychological phenomena. As Plamper points out, “conceptions of emotion have an impact upon the way emotion is experienced” (32)—and, one might add, the precise way that an emotion episode unfolds. As already noted, our theories and emotion scripts are likely to affect our simulations of causes and consequences. They may affect the memories that are activated in the course of an emotional response, what we attend to perceptually, what inferences we draw, what responses we consider, and so on. The problem with the example of Tybalt’s spleen may merely be that it is too simple or simplistic, that it assumes a less complex, less

Authors (I) 75 nuanced theory of emotion than we would need for full understanding of the historically situated emotion he manifests.1 This is not the fault of a meticulous scholar such as Paster. Nonetheless, it is a tendency of some affective historicists. In connection with this, Meek and Sullivan explain that, “[f]or some recent critics of Renaissance literature and culture … humoral theory was the essential model for understanding the emotions in the period” (“Introduction” 1). They summarize one trend in recent work, as follows: “Scholars in the field have tended to focus on the physiological determinism of emotion in early modern texts, arguing that feeling was something that happened to the body of the passive, receptive subject, who either gave way to these material impulses or attempted to resist them through stoical self-control” (“Introduction” 3). Meek and Sullivan counter that, in fact, Renaissance “writers drew on multiple emotional discourses in order to construct their own particularized models of feeling” (“Introduction” 5; see also Holbrook 266). There are two points to draw out of Meek and Sullivan’s claim here. First, during every historical period and in every group there is a degree of theoretical diversity, a degree to which ideas about emotion and other topics are multiple and contradictory. There is no simple, uniform worldview that marks all the work in a period; nor is there a single Foucaultian episteme. Both ideas may be useful for highlighting recurring patterns in what might be called “official thought,” the most widely asserted claims, the most prestigious beliefs and conceptual structures associated with elite authorities. But there is always vastly more to discourse than official thought—about emotion or anything else—in any given period or society. The second point to draw from their statement is that individual authors select from these alternatives in often idiosyncratic ways, producing sometimes highly individual accounts. Indeed, we may extend Meek and Sullivan’s point, noting that these individual theories need not be consistent either in a given textual instance or across cases. In other words, Shakespeare—or Binnie (or anyone else)—may depict emotion in very different ways across the course of even a single literary work. Moreover, these individual depictions may themselves involve an incompatible combination of theories. An amusing example of this occurs in Binnie’s Nevada when Maria talks to her brain. She explains that “you can’t just be like, okay brain, think. Because your brain is like, I am thinking! I am thinking at you, and then you’re like, Jesus, brain, relax” (79). In this and some related passages, Maria in effect assumes a twenty-first century neuro-materialism, a view that the ideas, feelings, motor commands—indeed,

76  Authors (I) thought generally—are encompassed by the brain. But at the same time, she assumes the existence of an incorporeal self. At one level, the incorporeal self is wholly contingent on the material brain—hence the plea for the brain to think; the self is helpless without that thinking brain. But at the same time, the incorporeal self is capable of enough autonomous thought to reflect that the brain is not supplying the self with adequate information. As Meek and Sullivan suggest, there is a similar complex of materialism and dualism in the Renaissance. For instance, the concept of melancholy is complex and to some degree inconsistent. In this case, the multiplicity is not precisely one of materialism versus dualism or idealism. It is, rather, of two sorts. As Drew Daniel points out, drawing on Shakespeare’s famous observations on the topic in As You Like It, there were many sorts of melancholy in the English Renaissance imagination. As the character Jaques explains, different professions have different sorts of melancholy, and individuals have their own individual melancholies as well (IV.i.13–22). Though we might not accept the idea of melancholy today, the point is generalizable. Even such evolutionarily ancient emotions as anger or fear, for example, are not simply generic. Any given emotion episode involves a specific activation of neuron populations from different emotion systems, a selective activation of emotional memories, a unique simulation of causes and consequences, and so on. Another sort of diversity in conceptions of melancholy has been explored influentially by Lawrence Babb. Recently, Drew Daniel has taken up Babb’s and related work on “the ongoing tension between the Aristotelian/Theophrastan account of genial melancholy and the Galenic account of pathological imbalance” (Daniel 17). According to the Theophrastan account, “a lack of melancholy disqualifies a person from attaining the heights of human excellence” (19); according to the Galenic account, in contrast, melancholy is “not a potential index of personal excellence but simply a physical illness … that physicians ought to try to cure” (19). The difference is often taken to suggest that a given author will plump for one alternative or the other. According to Daniel, for example, Babb thinks that the “genial” tradition wins out, while Paster opts for the dominance of the pathology view. In contrast, Daniel himself urges the interrelation of the alternatives. Our preceding observations, developed out of Meek and Sullivan, might lead us to expect a certain amount of inconsistency. This is indeed what we seem to find—and what leads us to a potentially more productive understanding of Tybalt’s spleen. Specifically, Romeo’s melancholy may be understood as an expression of poetic sensitivity. In contrast, Tybalt’s melancholy is characterized

Authors (I) 77 as pathological, an illness that requires medical treatment. To some extent, then, the play presents both views of melancholy, applying the Theophrastan account to Romeo and the Galenic to Tybalt. This might be reconciled with a more basic analysis of humors, however, by noting that the combination of humors in the two cases is different. Tybalt’s characteristic spleen is both melancholic and choleric (see I.iv.210 on Tybalt’s “choler”), whereas Romeo intermixes black bile (I.i.137) with the blood that fuels passionate desire (cf. Bate xiv). Yet, even here there is a further complication, recalling Meek and Sullivan’s idea of “particularized models of feeling” (“Introduction” 5). Romeo is apparently both melancholic and impassioned for Rosaline. However, as Stanley Wells points out, Romeo’s artistic nature only reveals itself truly with Juliet. As Wells puts it, “as soon as Romeo sees Juliet he speaks of her in the lines of rapturous lyricism … which make the terms in which he had previously spoken of Rosaline seem merely conventional” (155). Why does Romeo not manifest the same poetic sensibility with Rosaline as with Juliet? This may suggest a difference between lust and love, as Wells indicates. However, I am more inclined to see it as a difference between playacting and passion. Romeo’s relation to Rosaline seems to manifest, so to speak, a desire to desire, a longing to be an adult in a sexual relationship. It may have less to do with lust as such than with a sense of what he can tell his friends, and himself, about his manhood. The conventionality of Romeo’s comments about Rosaline, then, may be understood as resulting from the absence of humoral involvement, rather than its presence. Before turning to expressivism, we should consider one further topic that has sometimes been important in affective historicism— genre. As we will see in other contexts as well, genre is often inseparable from emotion. Though some broad, emotion-guided genres are fairly constant across cultures and historical periods, other, more specific clusters of work arise in particular cultural contexts or due to the intersection of particular historical developments. These too are often inseparable from emotion. A good example of affective genre analysis may be found in David Stymeist’s treatment of early modern “anxiety fiction.” Stymeist explains that “early modern news reports depicted the threat of household poisoning out of proportion to actual risk in order to profit from developing public anxiety” (30). The point extends beyond news to fiction as well, suggesting “a pervasive imaginative fascination with the lethal use of toxic substances” (30). Stymeist identifies recurring patterns in character, action, and even scene, as poison was linked especially with Italy (31). There was particular concern about

78  Authors (I) “[h]ousehold poisoners, typically disaffected wives or servants” (32). Crucially, “the act of poisoning, within this discursive mode” fostered “anxiety that an individual’s closest attachments might exploit a situation of domestic intimacy to adulterate the necessities of life with deadly substances” (34–35). The anxiety was particularly intense regarding wives. In keeping with these points, Miranda Wilson writes that “in most cases, the stories told of poisoning and murderous wives reinforce the patriarchal and familial structures so important in Renaissance England” (94). Margaret Hallissy explains that, in Stymeist’s words, there was a “misogynist tradition that links the use of poison by women with sexual desire and sin” (43–44). Clearly, Romeo and Juliet does not fall into this genre. However, the work of Stymeist, Wilson, Hallissy, and others provides a generic context for the play that may affect the audience’s emotional response and the critic’s interpretation. The play continues the association of poisoning with Italy and Italians. However, far from presenting an ethnic stereotype, Shakespeare gives a circumstantial account of both the poisoner and the apothecary who sells the poison. In a moving scene, the impoverished apothecary agrees to sell the drug due to his own desperation, leading Romeo to say that he pays the man’s “poverty” (V.i.79). The clear implication is that the apothecary does not have an enduring disposition—either “racial” or individual—to be complicit with murder. Rather, his condition determines his actions. More important, the domestic intimacy and death involved in the scene almost directly invert the pattern of anxiety fiction. First, it is the man who initiates the poisoning. Second, he is not covertly killing an unwanted spouse. Rather, he is killing himself due to the fact that he cannot bear to live without the spouse he cherishes more than his own life. Finally, Juliet, far from wishing to poison her spouse, bemoans the fact that he has not left poison enough for her own suicide. She too can imagine only unbearable pain in living beyond the death of her husband. The positive points—about what Romeo and Juliet do and feel—are obvious and banal. Romeo and Juliet’s love is exemplary in any case. However, its value is enhanced and its pathos intensified by comparison with the suggestions of a contrasting genre, a story in which the wife is degraded and the husband a fool, a story in which the wife longs for nothing more than the death of her husband. In sum, the history of emotion is a potentially rich area for literary study. It comprises the description and explanation of systematic social variation in any given component of an emotion episode or other element of affect (such as interpersonal stance). In principle, it includes all the components of an emotion episode. However, in practice, the

Authors (I) 79 history of emotion has tended to focus on a few areas of research and has rarely done so with explicit attention to the analysis of the components defining an emotion episode. This has arguably made affective historicism less clear and rigorous than it might have been. The particular focus on modulation is not unreasonable, as that aspect of an emotion episode may indeed be unusually malleable. However, the scope and precision of affective historicism could be enhanced by greater attention to the analysis of emotion episodes—including both what is and what is not historically variable in them. Finally, it is important to note the relevance of historically specific theories of emotion. But it is equally important not to overstate that relevance or to confine one’s analysis to the terms of such theories, or to oversimplify the theories themselves.

Note 1 In the case of spleen, some of this complexity is brought out by Wood, though the range of Wood’s references arguably makes his analysis somewhat diffuse.

5 Authors (II) Expressivism

The preceding chapter considered authors largely as place-markers for social commonality, points of intersection for recurring cultural and historical patterns. This chapter returns to authors. However, in contrast with affective historicism, expressivism concerns the author, not as a cultural type, but as an individual—indeed, not even as an instance of some type, but as a complex weave of specific endowments and experiences. Some of these endowments and experiences are general: e.g., standard human emotional architecture is part of the endowment of most authors. Others, however, are much more idiosyncratic. It is that complicated and often confusing intertwining of common and unique that constitutes an author’s emotional expression. Given this stress on particularity, it might seem that expressivism necessarily treats the real author only. However, as we will see, implied authorship enters crucially into an adequate account of expressivism as well.

Expressivism and authorship In his celebrated biography of Shakespeare, Will in the World, among many other topics, Stephen Greenblatt explores the ways in which Shakespeare treats marital love. Roughly, his conclusion is that, for Shakespeare, lasting romantic love is rare, perhaps impossible. Thus he writes that “there is scarcely a single pair of lovers who seem deeply, inwardly suited for one another.” This, among other factors, suggests that Shakespeare had “a deep skepticism about the longterm prospects for happiness in marriage.” In other words, the source of the recurring pattern in Shakespeare’s work is presumably to be found in his life. This begins to lead us toward expressivism. However, Shakespeare might have dispassionately observed the estrangement of married couples around him. Carrying this over into his work would involve expression in one sense—the expression of ideas. However, it

Authors (II) 81 would not involve expression in the more common sense—the manifestation of personally experienced feelings. After all, every scientific paper expresses ideas. We would not therefore count it as expressive in the usual aesthetic sense. But Greenblatt does not stop there. He characterizes Shakespeare’s skepticism as deeply personal. “It is difficult,” he explains, “not to read his works in the context of his decision to live for most of a long marriage away from his wife.” Indeed, there is not only the separation; there are other factors (e.g., Shakespeare’s will) that, along with speeches and events in the plays themselves, hint that the playwright had inside him “a deep pool of bitterness about a miserable marriage.” In the usual understanding, this is precisely the sort of personal experience that lies at the heart of emotional expression in art—what Wordsworth famously termed “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” There are two important aspects of this overflow—one bearing on authors, the other bearing on readers. The first is that the emotion welled up in the author himself or herself, that he or she truly experienced the feelings being expressed. There is a common view that this experience underwrites the work’s authenticity. That authenticity in turn is often seen as giving the work emotional force for readers, the second aspect of emotional overflow.1 Obviously, the two are related. The authentic emotion of the author is commonly understood as guiding a parallel emotion in the reader. Nonetheless, the two are conceptually distinct. Greenblatt in effect addresses each one in turn. As to the author, he explains that “the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.” Alluding more indirectly to the reader, he takes up his influential idea of “the touch of the real” within a fictional world, explaining that “Shakespeare had to draw upon more than his reading to give his characters the touch of reality.” That “touch of reality” is felt by the reader or audience member. It is worth dwelling for a moment on Greenblatt’s view that “[o]ne of the prime characteristics of Shakespeare’s art is the touch of the real.” He elaborates on this idea, writing that Shakespeare’s work involves “the vivid presence of actual, lived experience.” Whether he intended to do so or not, Greenblatt here gets to the core of expressivism. In this view, Shakespeare represented the world in a way that rings true because the representations are founded upon actual experiences of the world. Of course, the affirmation of reality might be taken to bear on mimeticism, not expressivism. However, I take the key insight of Greenblatt’s statement to concern something other than external,

82  Authors (II) depictive accuracy. It is not in mere imitation that Shakespeare excels. It is, rather, in the force—and specifically the emotional force—of his writing. That force, Greenblatt suggests, derives from the direct experience of the author. Moreover, it is clear that this direct experience need not be a matter of social or political details. For example, to give King Lear the touch of the real, Shakespeare did not need to have direct experience of royal abdication. But he did need to have experience of wounded pride, betrayal in an attachment relationship, shame, and humiliation. Arguably, he even needed the more particular emotional experience of seeing a parent age and be mistreated by his or her children. This is not so much a requirement for getting the facts of the case right as one of getting its tone right; it is not so much a matter of portraying the words and gestures accurately as one of fostering a parallel emotional response in the audience members. In short, Greenblatt’s idea resonates not so much with the idea of realism, but rather with something more along the lines of authenticity, specifically emotional authenticity. After all, what would Shakespeare have experienced that he could weave into the fabric of his poems and plays? For the most part, it is not large trajectories of events, given the borrowed plots of his plays. It cannot even be the dialogue as such, which is hardly realistic in any usual sense. It is, again, most obviously the emotions involved, and the psychology that underlay those emotions. But Greenblatt’s goal is to write a sort of biography, not to develop a theory of emotional expression. For that, we need to look elsewhere. There is no lack of theoretical discussions of expressivism in the arts, some of which draw on affective science for their explanatory principles. Perhaps the most profound and insightful fusing of affective science and expressivism is to be found in the work of Jenefer Robinson, on which we will concentrate in this section.2 Robinson’s theory of emotion is a good case of what I am calling a perceptual-associative account (despite her use of the word “appraisal”). Her treatment of expressivism is based on non-cognitive emotional response related to innate sensitivities and emotional memories, plus cognitive monitoring, which includes simulation. In addition to its theoretical precision and rigor, her work is also valuable for its scholarly treatment of the main Euro-American tradition of Romantic expressivism, on which she bases her own theory. Robinson begins by noting the ambiguity of the idea of “expression” (232).3 “Some works,” she writes, “seem to express their author’s emotions; others which are not expressions of anyone’s emotions nevertheless have expressive qualities; some works are simply expressive without expressing anything in particular” (231–232).

Authors (II) 83 The key division here is between authorial or artistic expression, on the one hand, and expressive qualities on the other. Suppose we say that a work expresses grief. This might mean that the artist felt grief, then embodied that grief in the work, a piece of music, for instance. Alternatively, it might mean that the work has certain qualities— such as a slow tempo or use of motifs from funerary dirges—that are connected with grief and in other contexts (e.g., actual funerals) do express the grief of real, grieving people. A common, post-Romantic view is that expressive qualities are crucial to expression, but the link with authorial emotion is unnecessary. Extending points made or suggested by Robinson, we might note that there are several matters at stake here. All of them appear to bear on emotions that are or could be felt by real people. First, there is the issue of identifying what emotion is, so to speak, normatively associated with the work or a passage in the work. A normatively sad work or passage would be one that in some sense should produce a feeling akin to sadness in the recipient. Put differently, one could say that a normatively sad work is a work with a sad implied reader or implied recipient. Then there is the issue of what emotion is actually fostered in real recipients. A normatively sad work might foster laughter in an audience, if it is badly done or the audience has a different emotional orientation from that presupposed by the work. Finally, there is the emotion experienced by the artist in relation to the work. In each of these cases, we may wish to make further distinctions. In the case of norms, it is useful to distinguish emotions that are merely normative in intent from those that we would wish to defend as normative in actuality. We might refer to these as “notional” and “real” norms. Real norms would identify some responses as misguided (e.g., giggling at a tragedy) or insensitive (e.g., being unmoved by a particular portrait of grief). In contrast, such responses (e.g., giggling at a tragedy) would illustrate the failure of the work, if we take the norms to be merely notional. For instance, some viewers would probably argue that the anti-marijuana film, Reefer Madness, has a notional norm of producing fear, but not a real norm. In other words, it was intended to produce fear, but reasonable and sensitive people may not experience fear in watching it. In the case of recipient response, we may wish to distinguish individual idiosyncrasy, based on peculiarities of personal experience, and general trends in response across a broad range of recipients. If responses deviate from norms generally, we are more likely to take the norms as merely notional, thus seeing the work as unsuccessful in this respect. If I alone respond with anomalous giggling to melodrama, we are unlikely to take

84  Authors (II) this as evidence that the work fails in its affective norms. This conclusion becomes more likely, however, as more and more audience members also giggle. On the other hand, a real norm is not a mere function of group response. Faced with an anti-racist work, the majority of readers may be so dispositionally racist as to respond inappropriately. Mere numbers do not determine that a work’s norms are merely notional. With respect to artists, we might similarly separate an artist’s emotions regarding the autobiographical sources of a work of art from the artist’s response to the work of art itself. For example, suppose Shakespeare’s attitude toward romantic love was indeed guided by his own experience of (unhappy) marriage, as Greenblatt suggests. Then it may be that, say, a particular part of the marriage of Goneril and Albany (in King Lear) has its source in a particular part of Shakespeare’s own marriage, such as a specific argument he remembers having with his wife. Even if that argument is the source of a particular sequence in King Lear, Shakespeare necessarily had a different emotional relation to the original argument and to the sequence in the play. Distinctions of this sort are implicit in our discussions of works. When we say that an author succeeded in expressing a certain emotion, we sometimes mean that the emotional norms of the work are real, not merely notional. When we say that an author was sincere or insincere in expressing an emotion, we are not referring to the original, biographical source, but to the revision of that source in the work of art. Thus, in speaking of sincerity, we may mean (among other things) that the author had the normative response to the work himself or herself. (Note that this definition obviates the problems with sincerity noted by Robinson [254].) For example, an anti-racist work may have empathy with a racial minority character as its emotional norm. An insincere anti-racist work is one where the author does not in fact have empathy with the racial minority character, though he or she designs the work to produce such empathy, perhaps for political or marketing reasons. As should be clear, sincerity is not the same as authenticity. Sincerity concerns the author’s relation to the work. Authenticity concerns the relation of the work to its biographical sources. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the latter. Though often criticized, the idea of authenticity puts in an appearance in ordinary criticism and literary discussion when we cite an author’s biographical experiences as undergirding his or her depictions of, say, a particular subculture or a professional group—or when we use such phrases as “he/she knows whereof he/she speaks.” Emotional authenticity is simply a specification of this, such that an author’s emotional experiences serve as the source for emotionally “expressive” parts of the literary work.

Authors (II) 85 In the context of authenticity, individual idiosyncrasy may be viewed positively as a source of non-idiosyncratic, even universal effects. One use of the term “universal”—in claims that a particular work (e.g., Hamlet) has “universal appeal” (as Greenblatt puts it)—ties it to readers’ experience of normative emotions despite great biographical differences. For example, our individual experiences of love and separation are diverse. That diversity includes Shakespeare’s own experiences, on which he drew in writing Romeo and Juliet. If that play is successful, Shakespeare’s use of his own idiosyncratic experiences must in some way have allowed him to communicate the normative feelings of the work (e.g., sympathy with Romeo’s and Juliet’s love) to a broad range of recipients. There is a sort of parallel here between the ways in which the idiosyncrasies of authors form the sources for “authentic” works and the ways in which the idiosyncrasies of readers may be understood to resonate with the events or characters in the literary work. But what do these distinctions tell us about expressivism? It seems intuitively clear that expressivist claims may be relatively strong or relatively weak, or somewhere in between. In other words, expressivism is not a single, uniform thing. Our intuitive sense that there are different degrees of expressivism may be partially spelled out by reference to the distinctions just noted. The weakest version of expressivism will simply require one or another of the elements just cited. For example, someone might say that a certain work expresses sadness if there is a real norm of sadness in the work. Alternatively, we might assert that a work expresses an author’s sadness if its sources are in authorial experiences of sadness, thus if it is authentic. Most of us would probably require sincerity (i.e., most of us would probably be disinclined to count an insincere work as expressive). The strongest form of expressivism would require the presence and alignment of all the preceding elements. In such an account, an expressive work would be authentic, sincere, real in its emotional norms, and “universal” in the sense of appropriately affecting a broad range of recipients (though not necessarily all of them). These components would be aligned in the sense that they would involve roughly the same emotion or the same sort of emotion—for example, grief, empathic grief, more general sadness, or some closely related feeling. This set of distinctions also has implications for explaining aspects of literary creation and response that bear on expressivism. The real norms of the literary text serve to partially explain readers’ emotional response. Those norms are, in turn, explained by the simulations of the author. The authorial simulations are partially explained in terms

86  Authors (II) of the author’s own emotional experiences. Finally, the universality of the work may be expressively explained by its emotional authenticity. It is worth pausing over the last point. In this view of the widespread emotional success of a work, the author’s affective experience in some way parallels the affective experiences of readers, resonates with them, as noted earlier. Through expressing his or her affective experience, the author is able to convey that experience to readers in a way that generalizing descriptions or categorizations—mere assertions of emotion (e.g., “I was sad”)—cannot. Though our particular experiences are different, the shared features of their particularity may foster emotional response by, for example, partially activating our emotional memories of related experiences (on emotional memories in literature, see for example Oatley, Passionate 179–180, and Hogan, The Mind 62–71). This is, for example, suggested by Greenblatt’s assertion of the “universal appeal” of Shakespeare’s work and his claim that “[o]ne of the prime characteristics” of this universally appealing work is “the touch of the real.” The preceding comments constitute a partial analytic of expressivism, developed out of Robinson’s observation that artistic expression is an ambiguous idea. This analytic does not reflect the precise way Robinson approaches the topic. Nonetheless, it is, I believe, largely compatible with Robinson’s views. Indeed, such an analytic serves to clarify and extend Robinson’s approach. After treating the ambiguity of “expression,” Robinson goes on to present the Romantic theory of expression. She argues persuasively that this theory has been significantly misunderstood. She responds to influential criticisms of expressivism, then presents her own account, which is a version of the Romantic view, but one informed by critiques of expressivism and recent developments in affective science. A crucial point to stress from the outset is that Robinson diverges from many of her precursors in not presenting a theory of art, but of a certain sort of art—expressive art. Not all art is emotionally expressive. Moreover, there is no reason to prefer expressive criteria for evaluating art. For example, some work might not have the expression of the artist’s emotions but the promotion of political change as its chief purpose. On the other hand, it should be clear that strong versions of expressivism will bear on non-expressive purposes of art too. For example, a political work will presumably achieve its motivational purposes only if it conveys emotion. By a strong expressivist account, a key factor in achieving such motivational purposes is having the source of the emotion in the authentic experience of the author. Indeed, even a weak expressivist account is likely to say that a political

Authors (II) 87 work will achieve its motivational goals only if it expresses an appropriate emotion in some minimal sense. Robinson sets out five components of “a plausible theory of what artistic expression is” (270, emphasis in the original). These constitute her “modern version” (287) of the Romantic theory of expressivism. First, the work provides “evidence” that someone “is experiencing/ has experienced this emotion” (270). I say “someone”—Robinson says “a persona”—because for Robinson the source of the emotional experience need not be the author, but may be a narrator or character. Robinson’s point is important. When Romeo expresses his love for Juliet, we would be wrong to conclude that Shakespeare felt love for Juliet. Still, it seems easy enough to deal with this difficulty while preserving a robust expressivism. One might merely say that Shakespeare simulated Romeo’s emotion on the basis of his own emotional experiences. The emotional expression need not have been identical in all components to be authentic. Shakespeare knew what it meant to be in love, even if that love was not for Juliet. More fully, his simulation of Romeo involved an empathic response consistent with the norms of the work and with emotional sources in his own life. Robinson’s second component is that the author intentionally manifests that emotion in the work, with the aim of making it evident that the persona—in this case, a character—is expressing the emotion. This is related to the establishment of norms. The basic idea is that the author envisions the audience’s response to the work of art (e.g., the poem), drafting and revising that work in such a way as to convey the persona’s (character’s) emotion expression. Thus, when Shakespeare has Romeo speak about Juliet, he intends readers to understand that Romeo is expressing love for Juliet. The third component adds success, for it makes “the persona’s emotion … perceptible” (270). Here, Robinson suggests something along the lines of sincerity, or at least authorial receptive response to the work. Specifically, she explains that “the persona’s emotional state is communicated to other people (and also the artist himself)” (270). The fifth component, found in some Romantic theories—and consistent with the views of such contemporary emotion theorists as Martha Nussbaum—asserts that there are benefits to expression. Specifically, the expression of emotion produces understanding of the emotion, such that “both artist and audience can become clear about it and bring it to consciousness” (Robinson 270). This is a version of the view that literature educates the emotions, which we will consider in Chapter 7. Here, I would like to concentrate on what is arguably the central insight of Robinson’s account of Romantic expressivism. This

88  Authors (II) is represented in the fourth component, whereby “the work articulates and individuates the persona’s emotion” (270, emphasis added). I stress the word “individuates” because Robinson makes clear two things that are important and consequential but not widely recognized. First, emotions are particular. No two cases of grief or anger are identical. We may explicate the idea by reference to the outline of emotion given in Chapter 3. The quality of an emotion is not a simple function of which emotion system it activates. That quality involves different components of the emotion system in different proportions, as well as differences in other enhancing and inhibiting systems. For instance, the precise emotional memories will differ from case to case, as will the details of current, changing experiences, and the nature of the simulations involved. More technically, the precise activation pattern of neuron populations will not be identical. The second important but rarely recognized point that Robinson makes clear is that, at least in the case of fiction, the particular emotion expressed is found at the endpoint of a process of creation; it bears on the work as it is finally developed. This is perhaps where Robinson’s qualms about authorial sources enter. It might seem initially as if a work that expresses its own unique emotion may not have its source in prior authorial experience because that experience would be unique in a different way. Again, we may draw on the preceding analysis of emotions in order to clarify the point. We simulate and respond to counterfactual and hypothetical particulars all the time. Considering whether or not to undergo a certain medical procedure, for example, I envision what pain I will experience if it is done and what possible discomforts I will experience if it is not and some illness results. My decision about the procedure is based in part on the intensity and valence of my emotional responses. These simulations are themselves based in part on memories from various sources (e.g., earlier medical procedures), which my mind integrates in ways that are currently not well understood but that result in new, particular (imagined) scenarios. Literary fiction is in effect an extensively elaborated and more fully self-conscious form of such counterfactual and hypothetical simulation. In the context of simulation, there is no reason why a literary work could not draw on authentic authorial, emotional experiences while still producing a work that is unique with its own particularity of emotion. Robinson argues quite reasonably that “the artist himself doesn’t know what he will express until he’s expressed it” (267). However, it does not follow that the emotion expressed “may or may not have been personally experienced by the artist” (264). In the account presented above, the sincerely expressive artist

Authors (II) 89 experienced the emotion on engaging with his or her work (just as he or she would experience a certain emotion on engaging with his or her real-life simulations). In addition, the artist whose expressiveness is authentic did experience prior, biographical emotions that served as sources for the simulation. This account of artistic creation as simulation leads to a final theoretical point. Robinson states that “we may not always want to infer to the actual author’s state of mind rather than to an implied speaker” (247–248). She subsequently notes that this creates apparent problems for an expressivist theory, if the source of the emotion is not the real author (263). But such problems appear only when one understands the implied author in certain ways. There are problems, I believe, for Robinson here. Specifically, she contends that “the implied author of the work … is constructed by the interpreter in interaction with the work understood as created by some particular real author” (260). The reference to “construction” suggests an account that is strongly reader-relative. This is borne out by her claims about the differences among readers, even in relation to norms. For example, “[i]n assessing the appropriateness of my reactions, I am implicitly construing the author as a certain sort of person. I am responding emotionally to the author as she seems to me to be; in other words, I am responding to the implied author” (179). In keeping with this, there are (in Robinson’s view) different implied authors for different readers. There is of course nothing wrong with using “implied author” in this way, though it seems that “inferred author” would be the more appropriate phrase. Moreover, as an empirical fact, it is the case that we will all simulate the author somewhat differently. But there are nonetheless two problems here. First, this account in effect allows no general norms for response or interpretation. As long as an individual reader’s implied author has certain ideas, those ideas are right for that reader, however wacky they might be: e.g., if a reader envisions an inferred author for whom we are supposed to identify primarily with Tybalt or Samson in Romeo and Juliet. In short, this does away with the element of normative success. More significantly, it seems to eliminate both authenticity and sincerity from expressivism. One may, of course, hold a radically reader-oriented position on both interpretation and response. However, left with only readers’ cognitions and affections, one would seem to have lost expressivism entirely. One seems to be left with, at best, a pale shadow of expressivism in the simulations of those readers who happen to concern themselves with what the (inferred) author intended.

90  Authors (II) However, there are other possible accounts of implied authorship. I will conclude with one that may serve to reconcile the various ideas about expressivism that we have been considering. First, we need to recall the common feeling, suggested by Robinson, that the author in some sense provides the guiding norm for understanding and responding to a work of art and the contradictory feeling that the author can be mistaken about his or her own intentions. The second feeling is not as peculiar as it may seem. We all acknowledge that people are sometimes mistaken about their motives or responses to events or situations. Moreover, a great deal of empirical research shows that introspection is highly unreliable. As Bargh notes, there is “a deep and fundamental dissociation between conscious awareness and the mental processes responsible for one’s behavior; many of the wellsprings of behavior appear to be opaque to conscious access” (560). But at the same time, we commonly hold a person’s intention as at least one proper norm for evaluating interpretation and, to a lesser extent, response. Suppose that, at the very beginning of the 2016 presidential race, Smith wrote, “Hillary Clinton will never succeed in her campaign. As a woman, she couldn’t.” Jones was offended, construing the speaker to be hostile to Clinton and to intend that she is, as a woman, an incompetent campaigner. We would consider it reasonable for Smith to reply that she supports Clinton and intended the comment as a criticism of sexism in the U.S. electorate. It is true that Jones simulated the speaker’s intent, thereby defining an inferred author. But Jones’s simulation of that inferred author does not constitute the norm for our understanding of Smith’s statement. Rather, we would probably say that Jones had misunderstood what Smith meant; thus, “what Smith meant,” defines the norm here. On the other hand, for the reasons just noted, it is always possible for Jones to claim that Smith has misunderstood her own skepticism about Clinton. Perhaps Smith was unconsciously sexist. Even so, the norm remains in some way the same. If Jones claims that Smith is unconsciously sexist, the claim is right or wrong depending on Smith’s attitudes (thus, Smith’s unconscious intention or unconscious motivation), not depending on what Jones has inferred those attitudes to be (which would be entirely circular). The sort of intent at issue in works of art takes over these tensions and contradictions from ordinary communication and self-understanding. The author is both fallible and normative regarding his or her work. How do we make sense of this? One way of conceiving of the implied author seems to hold a potential solution. As noted earlier, when we simulate hypothetical outcomes of real situations, we often base our decisions for action on our responses to the simulations (e.g.,

Authors (II) 91 in choosing whether or not to undergo a particular medical procedure). In discussing someone’s decision about a medical procedure, we might reasonably dispute his or her verbal explanation of that decision. But one obvious norm for evaluating explanations is the person’s emotional response to the simulation and the sources of that response. Thus Jones might say that he will forego a medical procedure because the risks are too great. Smith might respond that the risk is not in fact great; rather, the real reason for Jones’s decision is that he remembers too vividly the death of his father in the hospital where he would have the procedure. Thus, both take Jones’s response and intention (in a very broad sense) as the norm for understanding Jones’s decision. But Smith asserts Jones’s fallibility in identifying and explaining that response and intention. My contention is that the situation is similar with art. Authors engage in parallel, though far more complex processes of simulation and decision with their creations. Specifically, artists set out to produce an effect on a recipient. As Robinson rightly indicates, they do not know exactly what that effect is beforehand. Indeed, they could not, since the effect can be produced only by particularity; it is specific and unique. Thus they begin to produce something, evaluate it in light of their response, continue it, revise, and so on, until they reach a point where they have a satisfactory experience of the work as a particular simulation. Thus there is a cycle of production, response, revision, response, further production, and so on. That cycle ends when the artist concludes that the work is “right,” which in no way implies that he or she will be able to explain what constitutes being “right” in this case. Indeed, that is part of the task of the critic—determining just what has been produced and explaining its operation. In connection with this process, we might distinguish between the productive and receptive intents of the artist. The productive intent involves whatever gives rise to the simulation in the first place. The receptive intent involves only what the artist tacitly included in responding to the work as a general recipient and judging it to be “right” or “done.” For example, suppose Shakespeare simulated King Lear by (among other things) drawing on memories of his father. These memories would be part of the productive intent of the simulation. However, Shakespeare would have implicitly set aside those memories—or at least experienced them differently—in receptively evaluating other readers’ responses to the character. It would be the latter, more generalized response that guided his sense that the representation of Lear was or was not “right.” Again, this says nothing at all about Shakespeare’s ability to articulate just what would be involved

92  Authors (II) in that receptive intent—an ability that was presumably very limited and highly fallible. I have argued in Narrative Discourse that we may reasonably explain the implied author as precisely this receptive intent. This gives the implied author a key role in expressivism. Specifically, it is the implied author that supplies the norms for the work and defines the work’s sincerity. It also allows us to distinguish the implied author from the “real”—or more properly “producing”—author in such a way as to limit the authority of the latter with respect to authorial pronouncements on the meaning or emotion of a work. At the same time, however, it makes the implied author “real” and continuous with the producing author in such a way as to preserve the main insights of expressivism. Here, we might return to Shakespeare and Greenblatt’s study of “how Shakespeare used his imagination to transform his life into his art.” “Imagination” in this case is another term for simulation. The idea of transformation is partially specified in the preceding account, where autobiographical memories and their emotions contribute to the simulation of hypothetical scenarios, which the author then evaluates responsively. The exact cognitive processes underlying such simulation and transformation are not well understood at this time. But the basic functional principles seem fairly clear—and consistent between affective science and Greenblatt’s characterization.

Expressivism and interpretation The most obvious interpretive conclusions to draw from these broadly theoretical points concern the explanation of recurring patterns in an author’s work or his or her attention to particular themes. For example, to my mind, one of the most affecting narratives of Shakespeare’s childhood concerns the decline of his father’s status. When Will was a young boy, Greenblatt explains, his father had highly esteemed roles in the public life of the town. Will would likely have witnessed his father honored and praised by the elite of the society. This must in turn have enhanced the young child’s own inclination to idealize this important attachment figure. It also would have fostered a youthful pride in the familial in-group of Shakespeares. The lingering effects of this familial pride were manifest many years later in Will’s pursuit of a family coat of arms, a point discussed at length by Greenblatt. By Will’s adolescence, however, his father’s fortunes and status had begun to decline. As Greenblatt writes, he “ceased to be a person who counted for much in Stratford. His public career had ended, and his

Authors (II) 93 private situation had clearly deteriorated.” Indeed, things got even worse. At a certain point, this once-respected man was afraid to leave his own home. We of course do not know the details of Will’s experiences in this regard. However, we can reasonably infer a few things. Will must have felt great pity for his suffering father, seeing him perhaps slighted by former friends and admirers. At the same time, one would expect him to have felt a certain degree of anger at his father’s errors and misbehaviors—his illegal trade in wool, for instance (as Greenblatt notes, “laws … restricted this business to authorized wool merchants”). Finally, he must have felt some shame over his own familial in-group, associating the father’s crimes with the family more broadly. These emotions and associated memories would have served as important sources for Shakespeare’s simulation of literary particulars, especially regarding the standard tragic plot of the fall of a great man. Beginning from genre conventions of tragedy, Shakespeare would very likely have drawn on his childhood experience of his father’s exaltation for the initial, elevated status of the tragic hero. More significantly, he would almost certainly have incorporated his memories of his father’s decline and humiliation into the tragic reversal of that hero’s fortune. This seems to be just what we find in King Lear, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and in the backstory of The Tempest. Shakespeare might stress different aspects of the childhood experiences—sometimes emphasizing the crimes, sometimes attributing the fall to naivety or chance, just as he must have done in response to his own father. The point is not simply or even primarily a matter of emotionally indifferent facts. Most striking and probably most consequential are the emotional resonances, prominently attachment feelings. King Lear, arguably the greatest of the great tragedies, is the obvious case, with its scenes of Lear doting on his beloved Cordelia. As to our compassion, Lear is, in the well-known phrase, “a man/More sinned against than sinning” (III.ii.59–60). The phrase fits the Aristotelian definition of a tragic flaw or error. But it must have seemed to Will a fitting account of his father’s experiences as well. Will’s father was not literally exiled to the wilderness. Nonetheless, his confinement to the home, for fear of setting foot outside, was a sort of exile from society. Indeed, the points may be extended to other, sometimes surprising details of Shakespeare’s imagination. Consider, for example, Edmund and Edgar. Edmund’s resentment against his father was no doubt developed in Shakespeare’s mind from many sources. One possible source was his anger at his own father for the decline in the family fortunes. Of course, Gloucester has not declined in wealth or status, but

94  Authors (II) Edmund’s position is parallel to Shakespeare’s in that his own status and wealth are at stake. It seems at least possible that Shakespeare’s simulation of this character drew on his own memories of anger and resentment. More significantly, one of the striking things about Edgar is that he harbors no resentment against his father, despite justification. In this case, too, one can envision sources in Shakespeare’s attachment to his own father. Though, here again, one can hardly be certain or know the details, the general outline seems clear enough. Assuming he felt a genuine attachment bond with his father, young Will would sometimes have felt a relatively pure compassion for him. Moreover, during such periods of compassion, he would be likely to recall any bouts of resentment with a sense of guilt. This in turn would enhance the protective impulses that accompany compassion for a pitiable attachment figure. Thus one can readily imagine Shakespeare’s creation of Edmund and Edgar—and indeed their pairing—as derived in ordinary ways from the incorporation of emotional and episodic memories of his own childhood into his simulative development of the fiction. The analysis may even be extended unexpectedly to Romeo and Juliet. Tybalt is, in part, the contrary of Edmund. If Edmund seethes against his father, Tybalt rages against those he sees as humiliating the family patriarch (in this case, the uncle). It is hard not to imagine that Shakespeare himself felt similarly—at times hating his father and at other times hating those whom he saw as slighting that (beloved, but now disgraced) father. To my mind, Tybalt is rarely human and sympathetic. But there is a moment at the Capulet party when he seems to have a more profound character, where there is a touch of the real. That is when he invokes the “honour of my kin” against what he perceives as the humiliating mockery of Romeo, exclaiming that the latter came “[t]o fleer and scorn at our solemnity” (I.iv.175–176). Perhaps there is emotional authenticity in this part of Shakespeare’s simulation of the generally two-dimensional character of Tybalt. The obvious point of linking art and biography is explanatory. We account for certain observable patterns in an author’s work, and even some surprising specifics, by appeal to likely biographical sources of his or her particularizing, hypothetical simulation—in short, by one aspect of expression. But Greenblatt’s idea of “the touch of the real” suggests something more. So too do common uses of the term “authenticity.” Indeed, “authenticity” is often invoked as a value in and of itself. Personally, I do not have much sympathy with this view, and I have avoided that implication in my use of the term. Greenblatt’s idea is more subtle. It suggests, not value per se, but an

Authors (II) 95 explanation of value. Put somewhat crudely, one common use of the terms “­authentic” and “inauthentic” permits statements such as the following: “Whatever recipients may feel with respect to a particular work, the work is valuable (or not valuable) because it is authentic (or inauthentic).” Greenblatt’s implication is very different. Also put crudely, it permits statements such as the following: “One explanation of why a given work is emotionally powerful (thus valuable) is that it conveys a touch of the real”—or, as we have been using the term, “it is authentic,” which is to say, derived from actual emotional experiences on the part of the author. In sum, expressivism may be understood as asserting that the successful communication of emotion through artistic simulations is derived in part from the origins of those simulations in real emotional experiences of the author. These emotional experiences have been synthesized and re-particularized in the fiction through the author’s productive and receptive intents (thus as “real” and “implied” author). The idea seems to capture the intuitive appeal of Romantic expressivism, while making it more plausible and comprehensible through integration with affective science. In addition, it clarifies the nature of authorial sincerity and authenticity and their place in expressivism.

Notes 1 The idea is not a parochial one. For example, Levy discusses an influential seventeenth-century Chinese literary theorist who “asserted that the affective power of poetry depends on the g­ enuine experience of the poet underlying the experience of the poem” (937). 2 For a concise overview of some of the main alternatives for treating emotional expression in the arts, see Matravers. 3 Unless otherwise noted, citations of Robinson refer to Deeper.

6 Readers (I) Enjoying literature

Authors are, of course, important. However, they have no force or consequence without readers. Authors write for readers—first of all, readers they tacitly imagine or simulate, but ultimately with the hope of reaching actual readers as well. Moreover, actual readers are what give any author’s writing importance. They are also what make real the abstract guidelines given in a text, bodying forth the authorial “instructions” (Scarry 244). Most importantly for our purposes, readers are a key locus of literary emotion, insofar as this is real and not merely simulated (as it is in the case of characters, for example). Indeed, as our discussion of implied authorship indicates, authors are crucially readers themselves, readers not only of works by others but of their own works. Indeed, the emotions authors experience as recipients of their texts, especially when revising, are arguably even more important than the emotions they experience at the moment of producing the text initially. Of course, real readers are not the only readers significant for the study of literature. In some ways, the implied reader is still more important. We may define the implied reader by reference to the implied author. The (implied) author’s receptive reading of his or her work gives us the norm which is the basis for the implied reader. Another way of putting this is to say that the implied reader is a competent reader in Jonathan Culler’s sense (Structuralist). That reader can be relied upon to know the relevant conventions and allusions and to pick up on consequential patterns in the work. However, the implied reader goes beyond this abstract norm. The implied reader is in many respects more akin to what the ancient Sanskrit aestheticians called the “sahṛdaya.” Often translated as “connoisseur,” the sahṛdaya is the recipient who feels “identity with the heart [hṛd] of the poet” (Gnoli xliv). That concept most obviously extends the competence of the implied reader from information processing to emotion. As developed

Readers (I) 97 by the thirteenth-century theorist Abhinavagupta, it also involves a form of deep personalization, a filling in of emotional memories. In this way, the implied reader is related to the real reader in a manner parallel to the way the implied author is related to the real author. To understand how this works, we need to return for a moment to simulation. The real author draws on the real emotional experiences of his or her life to produce simulations of hypothetical (fictional) situations. As discussed in the previous chapter, he or she does this by incorporating elements of various emotional experiences into new, simulated particulars. The process operates not only in production, but also in reception. I may say to my wife that I won’t have a particular medical procedure. She may then present me with a scenario in which I suffer a more severe attack of symptoms than I have felt in the past. I do not produce this scenario. Moreover, it is not simply a memory. It is, rather, a new, particular simulation. In responding to it, however, I engage in simulation prompted by her comments. In doing this, I draw on my own emotion-laden memories in the same partial and selective way that I do when initiating such a simulation myself. This is precisely the process that occurs with implied readers. Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to say that my wife’s scenario has not only a real recipient (me), but an implied recipient (also me, but guided by norms defined by her). In presenting this scenario, my wife does not imagine that I will simply hear the words and construe their general meaning. The more concretely she depicts the scene (e.g., “We could end up in the emergency room at 3:00 a.m. with you gasping for breath”), the more she is likely to expect me to simulate the scene concretely and to fill out my emotional response with my own emotional memories. The main difference between this case and the case of most fiction is that my wife has specific knowledge about my individual memories and their emotional force. The skill of a literary author lies in fostering the same sort of responsive consequences without such specific knowledge. In sum, we appear to have at least some good reason to construe the implied reader as a set of general norms that is not entirely disembodied, but that always suggests the “concretizing” activity of a real and unique individual engaged in reading, to use Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological term for the reader’s process of filling in details. This is not to say, however, that the difference between implied and real readers is inconsequential. It is important both conceptually and practically. As to the latter, we come to understand the implied reader by carefully examining the work of art in its linguistic, cultural, and other relevant contexts. Such understanding is, in short, an interpretive or

98  Readers (I) hermeneutic task. In contrast, we come to understand real readers by empirical research on actual people. One primary organizational division of this and the following chapter is that between the implied reader and the real reader. In the present chapter, we will concentrate primarily on implied readers. This may seem a peculiar choice, since clearly it is real readers who feel such ordinary emotions as mirth, sorrow, or anger. However, the interest of professional readers (e.g., critics) in a literary work is not typically focused on what individual recipients actually feel. It is, rather, on what the text tries to guide us to feel. In contrast, when it comes to political and ethical impact (the topic of Chapter 7), our concerns often shift to the real reader. It is not that we no longer care about the implied reader. We do care. It is important to know what the author or implied author was trying to accomplish. But the actual impact on real readers is crucial as well.

Readers’ emotions The psychologist and film theorist Ed Tan has drawn an influential distinction between fiction emotions and artifact emotions (65, 82). Fiction emotions are the emotions we experience in response to the fictional world—its events, situations, and characters. They are fundamentally immersive emotions, emotions that we experience when, for example, we are caught up in a story. They are roughly the sorts of emotion that we experience in relation to events and situations in the real world. Artifact emotions, in contrast, are not immersive but reflective. They are emotions that we experience when we become conscious of the way in which a certain series of events has been shaped and directed. In consequence, rather than responding to the events themselves, we respond to the shaping and directing. The cinematic and literary significance of this distinction is straightforward. If I read Romeo’s effusive praise of Juliet and respond empathically to the incipient love expressed in his words, then I am responding with a fiction emotion. However, if I dwell on the brilliance of the diction, the metrical nuance, the rhyme and novel use of metaphor, then I am responding with an artifact emotion. Fiction emotions are more obviously connected with real-world emotions. However, it could hardly be the case that we experience artifact emotions uniquely in art. From the perspective of cognitive and affective science, it would raise the question of the origin of such a type of emotion. We do have something along the lines of artifact emotion in our ordinary lives. This occurs most obviously in cases where we appreciate a turn of

Readers (I) 99 phrase or a clever use of metaphor—in other words, with real-life cases of the sort of thing we respond to in film or literature. But we also experience this sort of emotion when we become aware of shaping intentions that are concealed and in some way inconsistent with the apparent emotional valence of a person’s actions. Jones compliments me on a newly published article and asks me to sign his copy of a recent book. I am initially pleased and feel appreciated (the correlate of a fiction emotion). But I soon learn that I am on the committee that will be evaluating Jones’s application for promotion. I then see his attention as flattery, as something designed, as a sort of artifact, and respond emotionally to that. Writers on artifact emotion tend to focus on such topics as the aesthetics of style or the ways in which self-referentiality bears on thematic issues. There also seems to be a common view that artifact emotions are the province of literary and film critics, not of ordinary readers or viewers. However, Plantinga points out that artifact emotions are quite common (74). For example, wonder over technological accomplishments is a form of artifact emotion. Other points at which ordinary recipients respond with artifact emotion include the beauty of photography and the emotional intensity of acting. As Tan notes, artifact emotions enter negatively as well—for example, when we feel resentment at the pretentiousness or obscurity of an author or filmmaker. Sometimes, artifact emotions involve inferences to “ulterior motives,” as in the case of my flattering colleague. For example, I was recently watching a Chinese film that made the evil of the bad guys (Nazis) so uniform and extreme that I began to think of the work as an artifact rather than as a storyworld. I came to wonder just what the political purpose of the film was and why the filmmaker decided to portray the Nazis as happily shooting random people going about their daily tasks. On the other hand, our various responses here are not simply a matter of fiction versus artifact. Consider the symmetry of figures in a painting. It was of course designed by the artist, but it inheres in the storyworld of the painting, at least from a given point of view. Conversely, who does what to whom is part of the story or fiction, but it was also designed by the artist. Moreover, beauty or aesthetic pleasure—a prime example of an artifact emotion—is not confined to artifact responses. I may respond to the beauty of the author’s language, or to the beauty of a character; I may delight in beautiful photographs or the beauty of the nature in the photographs. Given these points, we may come to wonder if there is really a theoretically significant difference between fiction and artifact emotions as such. The difference may

100  Readers (I) ultimately be a matter of some sort of first-order and second-order cognition—simply put, whether we take things at face value or infer concealed intentions, designs, or causes. That is consequential. But it seems to bear not so much on specific emotions (e.g., whether one emotion is an artifact emotion or a fiction emotion) as on the precise eliciting conditions for an emotion episode and the simulative or other elaboration of the episode. In this way, the fiction/artifact distinction cannot provide a fundamental, theoretical organizing principle for understanding readers’ emotions. These issues with the distinction do not undermine its usefulness in some contexts. Indeed, it is worthwhile to elaborate slightly on the idea of fiction emotions. I wrote earlier that fiction emotions are somehow comparable to our emotions when experiencing the real world. However, that is clearly not quite right, and it is not Tan’s position. Tan distinguishes between events in which we are participants and events that we merely witness (see 82 and 153). Clearly, we are not participants in fictional events. Tan contends that our emotional responses to fiction are more comparable to those of a witness. Thus seeing a car accident on screen is continuous with our ordinary emotional experience. But it is not continuous with our experiencing such an accident ourselves. Rather, it is linked with witnessing such an event. Plantinga points out that this is not quite right either (63–64). In most cases, witness emotions involve us as participants of some sort— for example, considering whether we should place a call to emergency services on behalf of the victims. Gerrig and Prentice present a variant on Tan’s view, which can overcome some of the problems with the idea of witness emotions as a model for fiction emotions. This is what Gerrig and Prentice refer to as “side participation.” Side participation occurs when we overhear someone recounting a story about people we do not know (e.g., when, on an airplane, we hear the people behind us talking about some event). This seems to be a good parallel for the experience of fiction emotions. Plantinga objects that there is a crucial difference—we know that the fiction is a fiction. Plantinga is correct in one sense. However, Prentice and Gerrig present extensive evidence that we do in effect treat fictions as if they were facts. As they explain, people have a “tendency to allow any information, reliable or unreliable, to gain entry into their store of knowledge and to influence their beliefs about the world” (530). For example, explicitly fictional stories may affect test subjects’ judgments about historical events. The problem with Gerrig and Prentice’s account of side participation seems to me to be something else. Specifically, it gives a plausible correlate for fiction in real life, but it does not explain side participation

Readers (I) 101 in real life. One solution to this dilemma should be obvious to readers of this book already. That is simulation. Fiction emotion is simply our emotional response to simulated events and conditions. Literary fiction is, again, a highly elaborated, patiently reworked form of simulation. Side participation too operates through simulation. A perhaps more appropriate name for fiction emotions, then, is simulation emotions, and I will sometimes use that term instead. Plantinga incorporates Tan’s distinction into a broader typology of film emotion. Systematizing Plantinga’s types slightly beyond Plantinga’s own presentation, we may isolate four broad categories, with the types constituting alternatives within the categories. The first category comprises artifact and fiction emotions. The second category separates primary emotions from meta-emotions. Again, meta-emotions are emotions we have about other emotions. These are not a separate set of emotion systems. They are, rather, the usual emotions. However, their eliciting conditions include one having a certain emotion oneself. Plantinga cites cases relating to patriarchal ideology, as when a man feels ashamed (meta-emotion) for having cried (expressive outcome of a primary emotion). Our experiences of literature and film (and life) are processes continually altered by changes in eliciting conditions. Those changing elicitors prominently include our own primary emotions with their consequences for meta-emotions—which in turn react back on the primary emotions, associated cognition, and so on. The preceding point is not simply a contingent fact about real readers. Sometimes, works of art encourage not only primary emotions but meta-emotions as well. In other words, meta-emotions may bear not only on the real reader, but on the implied reader also. For example, Shakespeare prepares the audience of Romeo and Juliet for the deaths of the lovers from the opening chorus, where we are directly informed that both will die. This awareness most obviously has cognitive consequences for our anticipation of what will happen. However, it also has consequences for the way many of us feel, and perhaps for the emotional norms of the work also. Despite our knowledge of the outcome, we might begin to hope that Romeo will not take the poison or that he will revive before Juliet stabs herself. In the context of the chorus, such an access of hope is, however, likely to be qualified by one’s meta-emotional response based on the simulation of a tragic outcome (as revealed in the prologue). It is difficult to say just what this metaemotional response might involve. One possibility is that it will shift hope to foreboding, a sense that one will be tragically disappointed by the outcome. In this way, it might enhance the overall tragic feeling by extending that feeling to parts of the story other than the ending. This

102  Readers (I) contrastive enhancement of tragedy by hope is perhaps part of the process that inspired Lauren Berlant, a prominent affective poststructuralist, to coin her influential idea of “cruel optimism.” Plantinga’s third category distinguishes “direct” emotions from those that are mediated by another person; Plantinga refers to the latter as “sympathetic/antipathetic.” Direct emotions are the emotions that the recipient feels on his or her own behalf. Plantinga cites suspense as a good case of a direct emotion. Mediated emotions are a little murkier. Plantinga instances admiration and pity. But it is not clear to me that these are not direct emotions. One might say that the character admired is fictional and therefore not a suitable target for direct admiration or pity. But the feared outcome is fictional too, and that does not appear to make it unworthy of sustaining suspense as a direct emotion. This does not mean that I wish to discard the direct versus mediated distinction. However, I feel that it is much more productively characterized as a three-way difference among egocentric, empathic, and sympathetic emotions (drawing in part on Berys Gaut’s insightful discrimination of empathy from sympathy [207]; as Gaut notes, we may sympathize with someone in a coma, and this is quite different from empathizing—thus sharing emotions—with him or her). Egocentric emotions are emotions that bear on my well-being. We may speak of an emotion as directly egocentric if its eliciting conditions are not defined by anyone else’s emotions. For example, I may like a novel so much that I want it to continue indefinitely. If an emotion relies on the feelings of other persons, then it is at least in part empathic, sympathetic, or the converses of these, covered inadequately by the ordinary language terms “antipathetic” and “unsympathetic.” (By this schema, emotions such as jealousy are in part directly egocentric and in part antipathetic.) The difference between empathy and sympathy, as stipulated in this account, following Gaut, is between sharing the character’s emotions (empathy) and sharing his or her interests (sympathy). For example, at the end of Binnie’s Nevada, one of the two main characters, James, steals heroin from the other main character, Maria. Strict empathy with James might lead the reader to hope he is able to try the heroin and enjoy it. A sympathetic response, however, is likely to see heroin as (to put it mildly) an imprudent choice for James, with potentially devastating long-term consequences. Plantinga’s account of direct and mediated emotions is particularly insightful when he begins to discuss the different ways in which we relate to characters—often only partially supporting their goals, while being critical of others. The point applies outside such obvious cases as drug abuse.

Readers (I) 103 Plantinga’s final category presents us with the alternatives of global versus local emotions. Global emotions are emotions that are more or less sustained throughout the work, such as suspense in a thriller. Local emotions are the emotion episodes that occur at specific points in the work. Plantinga draws this distinction from Greg Smith, though he alters it by incorporating it into a different theoretical system. Plantinga is right to distinguish his account from Greg Smith’s “mood/ cue” approach. However, despite Plantinga’s insights and learning, I find Smith’s account more satisfying in this case. I will therefore discuss this division in Smith’s terms. Smith begins with the idea that an emotion system is an associative network “that allows multiple causes without fixed sequencing” operating through “joint causation” of various components or subsystems (108). This is consistent with the account of emotion presented in Chapter 3, but it complements that account by stressing the mutual interaction of the components and the parallelism of their operation. For example, the expression of an emotion may react back on the feeling of the emotion, and it may affect the ongoing perception of the initial eliciting conditions of the emotion. Moreover, those eliciting conditions may be multiple and simultaneous (as with dialogue, visuals, and music in film). This mutually interacting complex may be modulated and redirected by prototypes and scripts (110), which is to say, standardized cognitive scenarios bearing on components of an emotion episode. In our terms, such scenarios are particularly likely to guide simulation of unfolding eliciting circumstances or possible actional outcomes. For example, in an angry encounter, a man in a particular milieu might envision issuing a challenge to a duel as one possible, perhaps even prototypical, actional outcome. Prototypes and scripts may of course affect components of an emotion episode other than simulation, as when a particular script actually results in issuing a challenge to a duel, thus in a behavioral outcome. With regard to literature, such scenarios affect both the author in producing a work and the reader or spectator in responding to a work. For example, the prototype of a romantic tragi-comedy might affect one’s simulative anticipation of the events in Romeo and Juliet when seeing the play for the first time. Smith goes on to stress two particular features of the experience of film (the point applies to literature as well). These are the key elements of his theory: moods and cues. In routine life, the complex diversity of emotional response will tend to make our emotional experience either neutral (with different emotions counter-balancing or, in effect, canceling each other into a routine state) or diffuse, even somewhat chaotic.

104  Readers (I) One task of many works of art is to give recipients an emotional experience that is both somewhat intense and largely coherent. Moreover, the works must accomplish that task across a range of recipients who are very often quite diverse in disposition. The means of accomplishing this are both global and local. Globally, it involves fostering “orienting emotion states” (113), crucially, mood. Again, mood is an enduring or perhaps recurring affective state with some elements of an emotion episode and, what is probably most important, an enhanced propensity to experience a certain sort of emotion episode. For example, a depressive mood state inclines one to experience episodes of sadness. As noted earlier, mood-congruent processing inclines us to experience ambiguous events in keeping with the dominant mood state. Thus a sad mood gives us the propensity to respond to neutral or ambivalent conditions as sad. In keeping with this, it primes sad memories, making such memories more accessible. It also affects simulation, including anticipation. As Wegener and Clark explain, “experience of sadness makes sad events seem more likely to occur in the future, but the experience of anger makes angering events seem more likely” (76). Smith argues that such moods are induced by “emotive cues” (116), often cues that are narratively “redundant” (116). We might put the point this way: In addition to moods and full-blown emotion episodes, people experience sub-threshold emotion activations or primings. Such partial activations result from inputs to emotion systems that are not strong enough to foster a full emotion episode, but that may contribute to an underlying emotion readiness or mood. Smith suggests that films contain many such sub-threshold activations as well as very brief bursts of emotion that are not elaborated, what we called “microemotions” in Chapter 3: e.g., a moment of surprise or disappointment, quickly superseded by absorption in subsequent events. The elicitors of such primings and microemotions are what Smith calls “cues.” These cues are to a great extent “redundant” in the sense that they are not crucial to the main narrative progress of the story. The redundancy is important because, for Smith, the mood is something that prepares the recipient to respond appropriately to the narrative, in accordance with the norms of the implied reader. The mood is established by a range of features. These of course include the “narrative situation,” but also “character dialogue, lighting, music, mise en scène, facial expression” (116), and we might add scene description, characterization, metaphor, verbal suggestiveness, and other features. When examined in light of Smith’s theory, Romeo and Juliet presents us with a somewhat surprising case of emotion preparation. Given the story structure, one might initially expect the play to cultivate a

Readers (I) 105 romantic mood. There is certainly an element of this in many productions of the play. For example, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film encourages a romantic mood through its musical score, through the longing gazes of its protagonists, and other means. But these are largely absent from the text of the play itself. Another possible mood suggested by the story would be suspense, our worry over whether the lovers will or will not save themselves and be united. But there is little in the way of classical suspense techniques in the play. Indeed, the Prologue reveals the ending, which greatly limits the possibilities for suspense. A third possible mood would be sorrow, a mood of enduring grief that anticipates the announced demise of the lovers. But that is unlikely for two reasons. First, we learn about the lovers’ deaths before we come to know and care about them. Thus we are prepared for the sorrow before we might even begin to feel it. The early announcement of the lovers’ fate is more likely to partially inoculate us against sorrow than to infect us with it. Second, there is nothing in the early scenes of the play that is likely to foster a sorrowful mood. Even later scenes that deal with grief are more comic than tragic. For example, on mistakenly thinking that Juliet has died, the nurse cries (rather ludicrously, to my ears), “She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead, alack the day!” Lady Capulet, evidently unable to formulate her own phrase, repeats what the nurse said, “Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!” (IV.iv.56–57). Especially keeping in mind that this is from the pen of William Shakespeare, it seems impossible to take such dialogue as manifesting any attempt at creating a mood of grief. Indeed, in keeping with this comic orientation late in the play, the opening scenes are largely mirthful too, filled with bawdy jokes and horseplay. The fight scenes may be staged in such a way as to foster a sense of heroic engagement. But even they are written in such a way as to suggest comedy more than anything else. For example, recounting the battle, Benvolio depicts Tybalt’s assault in mock-heroic terms: “He swung about his head and cut the winds” (I.i.107), which of course remained unhurt (I.i.108). But the emotional orientation of the play is not solely toward mirth. Right from the start, Shakespeare draws the audience’s attention to the language of the play—its sonorities, its rhythmic patterns and variations, its felicity of phrasing, its semantic nuance. In short, from the opening lines, Shakespeare encourages us to experience artifact as well as fiction emotions. The most prominent artifact emotion is also a sort of global mood—a form of aesthetic wonder that might serve to sensitize the reader to beauty elsewhere in the play, including the fictional world. Indeed, that sensitization should operate both directly

106  Readers (I) and through mediation, for example through our sense of Romeo’s response to Juliet. This analysis leads us to another conclusion about the play. Far from treating lust versus love or even prestige (adolescent bragging rights) versus genuine desire, the play is perhaps most aptly seen as treating beauty and aesthetic delight. When Romeo is first enchanted by Juliet, it is her great beauty that captivates him, beauty that he characterizes metaphorically as light: “she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” (I.iv.162). The imagery recurs in the famous metaphor, “Juliet is the sun” (II.i.48). Even at the end, Romeo denies the grimness of the mausoleum, claiming that “her beauty makes/This vault a feasting presence full of light” (V.iii.85–86). The vault is Plato’s cave, the dark, earthly place of mere imperfect material reality; Juliet is the pure idea, uniting the Good and the Beautiful. In short, Romeo and Juliet is fundamentally a play about beauty and our response to beauty. In the remaining section of this chapter, we will consider one of the two emotions that are prominent in Romeo and Juliet—mirth (or humor). We will address the other, aesthetic delight, in the treatment of style, found in Chapter 9.

Mirth Countless ordinary emotions make an appearance in our response to literature: fear, anger, jealousy, spite, indeed every emotion one can recall or imagine. Like aesthetic delight, however, mirth seems to have a special place in literature. We all often read literary works, watch movies or television, or go to plays in order to have a good laugh. Of course, we laugh at ordinary events and at witty conversation. But literature intensifies such mirth, often greatly. Mirth is, therefore, a particularly appropriate topic for the treatment of literary emotion. There is a great deal of work on mirth or humor. To my mind, a particularly compelling cognitive and affective scientific account of the topic may be found in the work of Noël Carroll, a prominent philosopher of art and film theorist. Carroll’s discussion has the further advantage of systematically outlining and interrelating earlier influential accounts of humor. I will therefore focus on Carroll’s work in the way I focused on Plantinga’s work in treating emotion kinds. Carroll begins his discussion with some terminological notes and a clarification of just what topic he is examining. Rephrasing Carroll’s point slightly, we might say that he is addressing a specific sub-type of the emotion of mirth, what he calls, “comic amusement.” The circumstantial eliciting conditions that foster comic amusement constitute

Readers (I) 107 “humor.” Carroll’s focus is therefore on humor, since he is concerned with defining and explaining those circumstantial elicitors. Carroll stresses that he is not explaining laughter (16) but comic amusement and humor.1 In our terms, laughter is a frequent expressive outcome of comic amusement and thus a good indicator of its presence. However, one may laugh without mirth and one may be amused without laughing. Thus an explanation of laughter would cover both too much (including some mirthless response) and too little (excluding some mirth). Carroll then turns to theories of humor. Though he is precise and rigorous in his treatment of these theories, he groups together types of theory that should probably be distinguished. Specifically, full theories of humor strive to achieve both descriptive and explanatory adequacy. However, they may do this by different means. Put very roughly, one broad division is between theories that begin with description and theories that begin with explanation. More precisely, theories of humor generally set out to specify what sorts of things constitute elicitors of mirth. Most theories do this by setting out criteria for such elicitors, usually necessary and sufficient conditions for humor. Most theorists go on to seek some function for humor, as specified by these criteria. For example, Carroll argues in favor of a description of humor as crucially involving a sort of unthreatening incongruity (e.g., a clown wearing extra-large shoes). He goes on to give a functional explanation of humor in terms of the inculcation of social norms (e.g., a norm for fit in clothing). Some theories, however, proceed in the opposite direction. Of course, all theories have a basic descriptive sense of the diverse phenomena that constitute humor. However, while most theories try to organize that diversity into some descriptive regularity, others rely solely on functional regularity. In other words, some theories accept that humor is descriptively diverse. Puns and pratfalls, bathroom jokes and witty aphorisms need not share some underlying similarity, such as being based on non-threatening incongruities. Rather, they may all give rise to mirth because they share some function. For example, in the cathartic theory of humor, all these types of comic amusement might share the function of releasing otherwise suppressed impulses. The advantage of the descriptively oriented theories is that they tend to be more empirically rigorous: e.g., they are more readily falsifiable. The advantage of the explanatorily oriented theories is that they more readily accommodate diversity in humor, and in the best cases explain that diversity. Most theories, including the one favored by Carroll, are of the former type. However, it is important to be aware of the distinction in order to evaluate theories fairly.

108  Readers (I) As Carroll indicates, a handful of theories have prominent partisans and are contenders for describing and explaining humor. Modifying Carroll slightly, we may isolate three of these, superiority theory, play theory, and incongruity theory, as falling into the description-first category and one, catharsis theory, as falling into the explanation-first category. As already noted, Carroll favors incongruity theory. I will therefore briefly outline the other three options—along with a further explanation-first theory, not treated by Carroll—before taking up incongruity theory and its functional extension. Superiority theory explains comic amusement by reference to “the pleasure of finding oneself superior to others” (8). We laugh at the butt of a joke because we feel that we are not so maladroit, gullible, or ignorant. We laugh at the drunk falling down because we remain upright; we laugh at the moron who stays up all night to study for his blood test because we know it is not that kind of a test. As Carroll points out, there is often something demeaning about jokes, and that quality is often self-congratulatory. Good examples may be found in racist jokes, which commonly involve members of a racial in-group disrespecting members of a racial out-group. But there are several problems with an account of this sort. First, it is clear that it cannot be a sufficient condition for mirth since there are many times when we feel superior to someone else but do not find the situation at all amusing. Moreover, it cannot be a necessary condition for mirth as there are many elicitors of comic amusement (e.g., many puns, or more generally wit that does not involve a comic butt) that do not appear to involve any feeling of superiority. For these and other reasons, Carroll sets aside superiority theory as a plausible account of humor. Before going on, it is worth noting that many writers have found the superiority theory appealing. I suspect this is because it gets at something in the nature and operation of mirth. As just suggested, it applies most obviously to a set of comic situations where there is a butt of the joke or, put somewhat more grandly, a comic scapegoat. The treatment of the comic scapegoat may take two forms—sympathetic or unsympathetic. In the sympathetic version, we allow our mirth to be inhibited by empathy; in the unsympathetic version, we do not. For example, in the former case, we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel only if he or she is not seriously hurt. The superiority account has at least two benefits. First, it recognizes that one class of humorous eliciting conditions involves diminishing a character, the comic scapegoat, relative to social values. Though superiority theorists do not, as far as I know, put it in these terms, it often places that character in the position of a child relative to an

Readers (I) 109 adult author and reader. The wobbly drunk is toddler-like; the moron is ignorant in the way children are ignorant (e.g., one can imagine a child asking if his father has to study for an upcoming blood test). In addition, the distinction between sympathetic and unsympathetic treatments of the scapegoat indicates why differences between identity groups may be so important in mirth. When the Capulets’ men mock the Montagues, the former find it amusing, but the latter are insulted. Each identity group discounts the humiliation or other hurt afflicting the other side. We will return to these points shortly. A second theory discussed by Carroll is play theory, which posits that comic amusement is “a release from the burdens of everyday activity” (42). Carroll says very little about this. He finds the concept of play too ill-defined to underwrite a theory of humor. In light of our preceding discussions, however, we might venture a definition of “play” as enacted simulation. When children play at calling on the telephone, they do not simply imagine telephoning. They act out the imagination, with gestures and props. Given this definition, Carroll would no doubt immediately point out that enacted simulation cannot give either necessary or sufficient conditions for the elicitation of mirth. First, there are many cases of mirth that result from, for example, punning that have nothing to do with enacting simulation. Second, there are many cases of play that we do not find at all amusing. I imagine that many cases of the second sort may be resolved by appeal to contradictory emotion systems: e.g., enacting a simulation of tragedy inspires fear or grief, which would leave little room for amusement. Other cases may be resolved by reference to habituation. When a stimulus is expected or routine, we stop responding to it (see, for example, LeDoux, Synaptic 138). Even the funniest joke loses its comic appeal when repeated frequently. (Perhaps at one time, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” was a comic blockbuster.) A child playing telephone with a toy telephone is not in itself funny, perhaps in part because it is ordinary. But a child playing telephone with a banana or a soup bone at least can be funny. Given these points, the play theory seems less vacuous and implausible, suggesting that there may be some legitimate reasons why many people have found it appealing. Our discussion of the superiority and play theories may suggest something about the possibility of recognizing diversity within humor elicitors, but unifying those elicitors by reference to function. In other words, they point to possibilities for an explanation-first account of humor. Specifically, both theories suggest connections with childhood. Superiority theory may indicate that one class of jokes puts a comic scapegoat in the position of a child. Play theory suggests that mirth

110  Readers (I) may be elicited by non-scapegoated, childlike activity (play). These are among the reasons why, several years ago, I proposed an evolutionary account of amusement related to distinctive properties of childhood (see Chapter 5 of What). I will not go through the entire account here, but give only a brief sketch. My contention is that mirth is provoked by a cluster of eliciting conditions that share the abstract property of being somewhat distinctive of childhood. The function of mirth is, roughly, to train our attention on children. Put more accurately, my contention is that mirth evolved because parents who found amusement in children’s play, pratfalls, wobbliness, and goofiness were more likely to be successful parents, passing on their genes, than those who did not and who might have been inclined to find children rather boring or who might have been overly sensitive to their foibles, becoming angry at their mistakes or overly protective regarding their tumbles. The point gains greater support from the difference between sympathetic and unsympathetic comic scapegoating, since sympathy would tend to develop along with kinship bonds, again serving evolutionary purposes. In other words, parents would be most likely to have sympathy first with their own children, then nephews and nieces, with whom they share some genetic material, then members of the larger in-group society, and so on. The implications of superiority theory and play theory do not constitute the only evidence for what might be called the parental attention theory of mirth. An illustrative example is puns. Carroll invoked puns against the superiority theory and I conjectured that he would do the same for a theory based on play as enacted simulation. But do puns fit in a parental attention theory? As it happens, they fit very well. Neurological research indicates that semantic ambiguity is processed somewhat differently by the right and left hemispheres. The left hemisphere constrains activated meanings much more tightly relative to context. In contrast, the right hemisphere generates more wideranging meanings. Thus, simplifying somewhat, the right hemisphere will activate both the financial and watercourse meanings of “bank” for the sentence “I went to the bank,” whatever the context. In contrast, the left hemisphere will activate only the former in the context, “I needed money,” and only the latter in the context, “I was tired from rowing.” Jokes derived from wordplay rely crucially on right hemisphere semantic activations—so much so that damage to the relevant areas of the right hemisphere desensitize a person to punning humor (on these differences between the hemispheres and their relation to humor, see Chiarello 145, Beeman 272, and Chiarello and Beeman 248.) The key point for our purposes is that children’s semantic

Readers (I) 111 activations are much less context dependent than those of adults (see Kane 41, 43). In short, the principle of context-free semantic processing characterizes both certain forms of verbal humor and childhood language propensities. I should stress that the parental attention theory does not imply that, in terms of joke-telling, children are funnier than anyone else; they are usually much less funny. Nor does it imply that things a child could not have done cannot, therefore, be funny. The theory indicates only that we will experience mirth from the broad types of behavior that characterize childhood. Again, wordplay is a good case. The most intensely comic experiences of wordplay result from complexities of meaning that would be far beyond the capacities of children to comprehend, never mind produce. But they still follow the same general principle of right hemisphere overproduction of meanings, with limited contextual constraint. The general mechanism is characteristic of childhood. The extensive application of the mechanism in, say, Finnegans Wake, is not. Before turning to incongruity theory, we should remark briefly on the one explanation-first account treated by Carroll, what might be called the “catharsis theory.” In this view, comic amusement is a matter of “dissipating built-up feelings” (38). Carroll more or less dismisses this account as imprecise and implausible. My own inclination is to agree with Carroll that it does not provide an adequate account of mirth. Nonetheless, it would be worth considering what sorts of humor it seems to explain—humor related to taboos (as in scatological humor)—and why it seems to explain our mirth in these cases. Unfortunately, constraints of space prevent me from entering more fully into this topic, though I cannot resist remarking that certain sorts of taboo and taboo breaking are readily associated with childhood, even if one does not accept the Freudian idea of an anal stage. Again, Carroll’s preferred account of humor is incongruity theory, or more accurately, the theory of “perceived incongruity” (16, italics in the original). By this account, comic amusement is elicited by “deviation from some presupposed norm” (17). The norms at issue are in principle very diverse. They include “laws of logic and reasoning, stereotypes, norms of morality, of prudence, and of etiquette,” among other matters (27). Carroll points out early on that incongruity is at best a necessary condition (28). It cannot be sufficient, as there are many cases where we encounter incongruity and are not amused. Carroll sets out to eliminate these exceptions by further qualifying the theory’s criteria. First of all, “the percipient must feel unthreatened” (29). If we find an incongruity dangerous, we will respond primarily

112  Readers (I) to the danger, not to the incongruity. In addition, he comments, the percipient should not find the elicitor “annoying” (37). In both cases, threat and annoyance, it seems that Carroll is simply treating a general principle of emotion elicitation. The activation of some emotion systems inhibits the activation of other emotion systems. Due to “hedonic asymmetry” (see Frijda, Emotions 323), this means that negative emotions generally inhibit positive emotions. Faced with elicitors of fear and sexual desire (e.g., a bear and an attractive partner, both at the campsite), we are likely to feel fear, not sexual desire. The same point holds for fear and comic amusement. Carroll is a bit vague about what constitutes annoyance. His examples suggest frustration of one’s preferences, thus a mild form of anger, which fits the analysis in terms of emotion system inhibition. One could also imagine “annoyance” being used to characterize forms of over-habituation. Hearing the same tune over and over on the radio becomes annoying, even if we happen to like the song in itself. The same sort of thing occurs with elicitors for mirth. We tire of their repetition. This too is a general principle of emotional response. As already noted, emotional response is contingent on the elicitor not having become habitual. Moreover, in consequence of hedonic asymmetry, such habituation is more likely to occur with pleasurable emotions than with aversive ones. Finally, Carroll qualifies the incongruity theory by maintaining that comic amusement does not involve a “genuine, puzzle-solving attitude” (37). Carroll’s basic idea here is that we investigate all sorts of incongruities, but we often do not find them funny. Few giggles are provoked by the wave-particle duality of light, for example. Carroll tries to separate out such cases by maintaining that in the case of wave-particle duality we engage in genuine puzzle-solving, whereas in the case of jokes, we do not. This doesn’t seem quite right, however. I have to solve the puzzle of the joke or I won’t get the humor. For example, Carroll tells one joke along the following lines: Jane hears on the radio that some maniac is driving the wrong way on the highway. Knowing John takes that highway at that time, she calls his cell phone and warns him. John replies that it’s worse than she thinks; it’s not just one maniac but hundreds of them. This is a puzzle that we need to solve. We need to figure out just what is going on in this strange situation. There are two possibilities: (1) Hundreds of people are going the wrong way on the highway, and (2) John is going the wrong way and thinks he is going the right way, despite the evidence. If the second possibility does not occur to us or if we do not infer that it is the correct explanation, we won’t get the joke. This seems to me to be a case of genuine puzzle solving. There

Readers (I) 113 is of course a difference from the case of wave-particle duality, since basically anyone can solve the puzzle of the joke. This can make it seem as if one incongruity involves puzzle solving and the other does not. But that is wrong. The demarcation criterion cannot therefore be one of puzzle solving as such. I suspect the difference has to do with the outcome of the puzzle solving. In terms of the parental attention account, perhaps the difference is that the solution makes reference, not to complex mathematical properties, but to a sort of seemingly childlike confusion. Carroll tentatively adopts a version of incongruity theory, with the qualifications regarding threat, annoyance, and puzzle solving just noted. He nonetheless worries that the fundamental explanatory concept, incongruity itself, is too vague to constitute a criterion for isolating humor. It is interesting that Carroll makes much the same objection to other theories, where he takes it to be much more devastating. Nonetheless, it may be possible to operationalize incongruity theory at least to some extent, thus partially obviating the difficulty. Indeed, Carroll appears to do something of just this sort later on. Specifically, there is some socially accepted norm. That norm may be stated as a simple generalization suggesting what people are like on average or as an aspirational principle suggesting social ideals. There is some (non-threatening, non-annoying) violation of that generalization or principle. The violation may be explained by some other principle. In the case just cited, the principle would be that people drive in one direction on the highway. The violation is that one person is driving the wrong way. The explanation is in part particular to John, who is unusually confused. But his confusion suggests a general principle as well—that we have an egocentric tendency to think of ourselves as right despite massive disagreement. There is, nonetheless, a problem here. We encounter incongruities all the time, but we often do not find them funny. Moreover, the problem does not seem to be a matter of threat or annoyance in all cases. Jones may misread the instructions when putting together a piece of furniture. If we do not have to correct his mistakes, we need not find his error annoying. But we also do not necessarily find it amusing, even if it instantiates a principle such as “Haste makes waste.” It seems that we need some further criterion to determine the types of non-threatening, non-annoying rule violation that are mirth-provoking. In this respect, it is not clear that the incongruity account has that much to recommend it over the alternatives considered by Carroll. Again, description-first theories do not ignore function. They simply postpone functional analysis until after the descriptive unification

114  Readers (I) of the target phenomena has been accomplished. Thus Carroll considers what function incongruity might serve. As it happens, the preceding case of John on the highway leads nicely to Carroll’s account of the function of humor. The two-fold nature of our puzzle solution in that case points to one idiosyncrasy (John is direly mistaken about his driving) and one general social point (many of us are bullheaded, even in the face of vast disagreement). The function of humor concerns the social point. It is in effect didactic. The joke teaches us something not just about John, but about ourselves—perhaps that we need to be more self-critical when faced with uniform disagreement from others or, put less positively, that we need to conform to standard ways of acting rather than persisting in independent thought and action (or perhaps simply that we need to pay greater attention to “Do Not Enter” and “One Way” signs). More exactly, Carroll presents two related but not identical functions for humor. We might call them “socialization” and “adaptive learning.” Socialization is the process of guiding people to internalize social norms so that they not only understand them, but follow them implicitly. Humor in this account “is primarily a source of social information about the norms that govern the cultures that we inhabit … Humour, and the comic amusement that attends it, alerts us to the relevant social norms and serves to reinforce them” (76). The joke about John’s driving makes us aware of the hazards of independent thought—or, rather, a set of mirth elicitors collectively contributes to the general socialization processes that inculcate a norm critical of non-conformity. This is part of developing an in-group, and opposing it to out-groups. “When we laugh together,” Carroll writes, “we are in effect acknowledging our membership in a community” marked by “shared presuppositions about norms” (77). What Carroll says here seems to me entirely true, indeed uncontroversially so. However, it does not seem to be a very good explanation of humor as such. Social norms are disseminated through beauty, suspense, attachment feelings, anger, fear—indeed, every emotion and associated discourse. It would be very strange if social dynamics did not engage mirth in the processes of socialization also. But it hardly follows from this that socialization is the function, the evolutionary “purpose,” of mirth. The case is not greatly helped by the incongruity theory, since it is difficult to imagine that witty incongruities serve to socialize us more than do invocations of fear or anger, and we would hardly say that the main function of fear or anger was socialization; this would not fit the evolution of similar emotions in many animals.

Readers (I) 115 At the end of the book, Carroll seems to opt for this socialization view of humor (see 115). However, he does offer an alternative, what I have referred to as “adaptive learning.” Carroll takes up influential work by Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and others, to note that we engage in cognitive short-cuts or “heuristics” all the time. For example, the “availability heuristic” leads us to assume something is common to the degree that we can think of cases in our acquaintance.2 If I have trouble with a Volvo, I am likely to assume that problems with Volvos are common, despite the statistical insignificance of my particular case. Carroll follows the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky in hypothesizing that “humour debugs our mental processing routines by ferreting out and foregrounding the weaknesses of our various cognitive shortcuts” (72). He goes on to suggest that “perhaps trading incongruities sharpens our abilities and the abilities of our interlocutors to detect the kinds of errors to which our heuristically driven mental processing disposes us” (74). For example, Smith’s doctor tells him to lose weight. Smith protests that he cannot give up pizza, the centerpiece of every meal. The doctor recommends a compromise. Rather than eating six pieces of pizza at every meal, he could eat four. Smith enthusiastically agrees. From that evening on, he is careful to slice his pizza into four rather than six slices. Carroll points out correctly that this joke relies on the heuristic that more in number equals more in other aspects of quantity. But it seems enormously unlikely that anyone learns anything about that heuristic from cases such as this. The error of the heuristic in this case is obvious. Indeed, if it were not obvious, the example probably would not be funny. Moreover, cases such as John’s driving do not seem to rely on heuristics at all. Carroll relates his analyses to jokes. However, they bear no less directly on literary works. As it happens, I generally do not find Romeo and Juliet a particularly funny play, despite its emphasis on verbal wit. But it appears to fit Carroll’s analysis quite well. Consider, again, the opening scene of the play. Sampson and Gregory enter and immediately begin to engage in punning. From Carroll’s perspective, there is incongruity since the initial context of the word yields one meaning that is almost immediately changed into something else. “Carry coals” in the idiomatic sense of submitting to insult (see note to I.i.1) shifts to “colliers” (literal carriers of coal), which changes in turn to “choler” (anger), and thence becomes “collar” (in the sense of a noose; see I.i.1–4). The incongruities multiply at high speed as the first semantic context changes to the second, which alters in the third, which transforms into a fourth, and so on. In each particular case, the purpose

116  Readers (I) of the pun is to develop a feeling of in-group alliance of Sampson and Gregory with one another and with the Capulets generally, and to simultaneously develop a sense of out-group antagonism against the Montagues. In short, the opening wit of the first scene serves to affirm “membership in a community” with its “shared presuppositions about norms” (Carroll 77). In doing this, it might also be said to contribute to socialization in reinforcing those norms. The following series of rape jokes (“I will … thrust [Montague’s] maids to the wall” [I.i.15–17]) have the same purposes, but in this case the in-group is men, not Capulets, and the out-group is women, not Montagues. In short, the scene in many ways conforms to Carroll’s preferred descriptive and explanatory analyses. But the fit is imperfect. The scene certainly involves incongruity. On the other hand, that incongruity does not seem to be a matter of social norms; it is simply a matter of shifting semantic contexts. Something akin to socialization is involved as a purpose of the wit. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to see socialization as the functional origin of comic amusement. Socialization seems, rather, to be a particular use to which comic amusement may be put in this and other individual cases. Again, I myself do not find the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet to be funny. I imagine most of my readers do not either. To find something that actually provokes comic amusement in me, I have to turn to Binnie’s novel. I will therefore conclude this chapter with a few brief comments on Nevada. To a great extent, I find my reaction to humor in Binnie’s book more in keeping with Greg Smith’s account of global and local emotions—and with the parental attention account—than with Carroll’s treatment of incongruity. Binnie’s novel is an emotionally complex work that cues and sustains an ambivalent mood that certainly includes a component of ironic amusement (along with mild suspense and a broadly sympathetic goodwill). The ironic amusement prepares us for the little bursts of wit that flash up regularly in Binnie’s text. Here is a simple example. Maria is preparing to write something in her journal, and the narrator, presumably reflecting Maria’s thoughts and attitude, comments that it is “[a]n honest-to-god paper notebook journal like our ancestors used to use” (95). I laughed out loud when I read this line, specifically at the word “ancestors.” I was particularly primed for ironic amusement because the preceding paragraph had informed us that Maria had finally learned a lesson from her friend’s plunge into heroin—that she herself “needs to be extremely irresponsible in her life from now on” (95). Reminded of the utter untrustworthiness of Maria’s judgment, we are broadly prepared for the historical short-sightedness of connecting pens and notebooks with

Readers (I) 117 “ancestors”—a short-sightedness that is, of course, more consistent with children’s estimations of time than those of adults, thus suggesting the relevance of the parental attention account here as well.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, citations of Carroll refer to Humour. 2 For a nuanced treatment of this heuristic, see Schwarz and Vaughn.

7 Readers (II) Learning from literature

The following chapter continues the focus on recipients, now treating the normative or educative function of literature in its relation to emotion. Historically, this has often been discussed in terms of “aesthetic education” or “training of sensibility.” Today it is most often treated as a matter of cultivating empathy. Here, the emphasis is on real readers. However, implied readers are not irrelevant. Indeed, the treatment of empathy emphasizes the continuity between the two, the way that the implied reader virtually always suggests particularization through real readers. This continuity is especially obvious and important in the context of analyzing empathy due to the ethical and political imperatives involved. The whole point of cultivating empathy is to move real people. It is not an inferential ideal for a refined, hermeneutic elite, sensitized to the nuances of an implied reader’s response. Generally, its purpose is to spread empathic response throughout a large body of readers. But that body of readers also constitutes a target audience, and a work that appeals to the empathic response of one group may operate very differently from a work that appeals to a different group. Such appeals are in part a matter of implied readership. More exactly, we may isolate two converging trends in recent writings on literature and empathy. One is more specific to literature, often empirical, and consists in an assertion of the special place of literature in the cultivation of empathy. The other is more general, often theoretical, and involves the affirmation of empathy as a foundation for ethical behavior, especially toward groups that are the target of social discrimination. Before addressing either trend, however, we need to clarify what empathy is, and what it is not.

Empathy The first thing to note is that empathy always involves a subject and a target. If John empathizes with Sally, then John is the subject of

Readers (II) 119 empathy and Sally is the target. The second thing to note is that “empathy” is used in at least two very different ways. In the more common usage, it refers to the subject and target experiencing the same emotion. However, the term is sometimes used to refer to mental processes that are much more general. For example, suppose Sally leaves the department meeting before the announcement of a salary freeze. John, aware of Sally’s departure, will understand that she does not know about the freeze. That understanding is sometimes referred to as “cognitive empathy.” Cognitive empathy is more or less equivalent to Theory of Mind—or, for some writers, a subset of Theory of Mind treating only “awareness of another’s feelings” (Hoffman 230). Theory of Mind is our capacity to understand other people’s mental states; it may operate through inference or simulation (see Chapter 3 of Doherty). Cognitive empathy is contrasted with “affective empathy,” which is not a matter of understanding others but “feeling what another feels” (Hoffman 230). In the following pages, I will use “empathy” in the more common, narrower sense—the equivalent of “affective empathy”—unless otherwise noted. So, empathy occurs when a subject and a target feel the same emotion. But obviously this is not sufficient. Tom and Jane may both feel sad. But it hardly follows that one is empathizing with the other. It is also necessary that the perceived or simulated emotion of the target be the cause of the subject’s emotion. If Jane empathizes with Tom’s sadness, Jane must feel sad because she experiences Tom as feeling sad. Here again we encounter a complication. Some writers would say that Jane has to be right about Tom being sad. Others would distinguish empathic feeling from empathic accuracy. Jane may be spoken of as having empathic feeling for Tom (or, more briefly, empathy for Tom), even if her empathy is inaccurate. I will follow this usage. If Jane simulates Tom’s condition as one of sadness and in consequence feels sad herself, I will refer to the feeling as “empathic.” I will maintain this usage even if it happens that Tom is not sad and thus that her empathy is inaccurate. But this too is not enough. The need for further qualifications is brought out by the difference between empathy and emotion contagion. If Tom thinks he sees a bear and screams, this may cause fear in Jane, who is standing nearby in the campsite. But the fear in Jane is not empathic, since it is fear for herself and not fear for Tom. Thus, in order to be empathic, the emotion shared with the target must be simulated from the perspective of the target and not simulated from the perspective of the subject. In other words, the emotion must be functionally “allocentric,” not “egocentric.” For example, in the case

120  Readers (II) of emotion contagion, actional outcomes for fear would bear on the subject’s safety. However, in the case of empathy, actional outcomes for fear would bear on the target’s safety. In a related way, empathy is also contrasted with “personal distress,” which is a form of egocentric emotional response. As Nancy Eisenberg explains, “personal distress is a self-focused, aversive affective reaction to the apprehension of another’s emotion” (260). A somewhat subtler distinction is that between empathy and sympathy. Some writers use “sympathy” to refer to a feeling of compassion for the empathic target. However, that is, in effect, written into the allocentric criterion. Other authors use “sympathy” to refer to wishing the best for the target, typically from a combined perspective of the subject and the target. Most often, the synthesis of perspectives involves “correcting” epistemic, moral, or prudential “errors” on the part of the target. Thus, if I empathize with a drug addict trying to get a fix, I might want him to score the drug, since that is what he wants. However, if I sympathize with him, I may want him to be admitted to a clinic. That recognizes his suffering and aims for its relief, but through different means than he might prefer. Empathy should also be distinguished from what psychoanalytic writers refer to as “projection.” It is no easy thing to maintain an allocentric perspective. As Leaf van Boven explains, “affective perspective taking is egocentrically biased: People project onto others their own reactions to affective situations” (305). This returns us to the topic of empathic accuracy and the possibility of what Suzanne Keen refers to as “false empathy.” Indeed, the idea of projection may lead us to wonder how empathy may ever be accurate at all. Obvious factors contributing to accuracy include the fact that people are ultimately pretty similar; moreover, we can gain evidence about another person’s feelings through many means: testimony, observation, simulation that self-consciously alters our perspective, among others. A currently popular answer is somewhat narrow and mechanical. In this view, we achieve emotional consonance with others to a great extent through the operation of mirror neurons.1 Mirror neurons are neurons that are activated by both the performance of an action (such as the emotionally expressive action of smiling) and the perception of an action (such as seeing someone smile). As Marco Iacoboni writes, “Through their firing, mirror neurons would also send signals to emotional brain centres … to make us feel what other people feel” (“Mimicry” 255; for a fuller discussion, see his Mirroring, and see Hickok for a rigorous analysis and criticism of mirror neuron theory). Similarly, Alvin Goldman asks, “Do empathizers really undergo states

Readers (II) 121 that match those of their targets? Are the feeling states of receivers exactly the same as those of their targets?” He answers these questions, saying, “Since the discovery of mirror neurons and mirroring processes … there is much less room for skepticism” (33). In keeping with this, it has become common for humanists to refer to our mental life as occurring not within people but between people (see, for example, Palmer). Consistent with Iacoboni and Goldman, some cognitive literary critics claim that one can literally feel someone else’s pain (see Armstrong 160). But, as we have already discussed, any emotional experience is highly particular—a compound of ongoing perceptions, simulations, and emotional and representational memories. Emotional mirroring at best activates broadly functionally similar cortical and subcortical areas; the specific neuronal connections (hence memories, simulations, etc.) necessarily differ greatly. As McFee notes, “key limitations will flow from [the target’s] distinctive central nervous system” (191). In this way, even when we get it right, empathy is necessarily always, to a degree, wrong. “I know how you feel,” however well meant, is never quite right. This discrepancy can be consequential when it comes to political and ethical results of empathizing, and it is one of the points that leads writers to criticize treating empathy as a foundation for ethics.2 Nonetheless, most writers would probably agree that empathy is a significant, though not absolute, moral value.

Literature and empathy: Empirical study If empathy is at least to some degree an ethical and political good, we might reasonably ask how we might foster more of it. What educational or other practices might encourage empathy, perhaps especially empathy that works against in-group biases? The reading of literature is commonly put forward as a way of producing empathic consequences. This intuitive view has been supported in recent years by a growing body of research that suggests literature can indeed cultivate empathy, at least in narrow contexts. Some of the most important and influential work in this area has been undertaken by a group of researchers associated with the cognitive scientist and award-winning novelist Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto. For example, in one important study, Oatley and his team “found that the more fiction people read, the better they were at” performing some tests of interpersonal understanding (Such Stuff). Research by other groups has reached similar conclusions, sometimes treating different variables in readers’ responses. For example, Oatley summarizes work by

122  Readers (II) Mazzocco and colleagues, which “found that some people were more easily transported [or immersed in a text] than others, that a narrative was more effective at inducing transportation and persuasion than a purely rhetorical argument carrying the same information about a minority group, and that high transportation and changes of attitudes occurred because the text induced empathy for the people of minority status” (Such Stuff). Empirical research on literature and empathy has a number of characteristics that are worth outlining. First, it is important to note what the research does and does not test. Generally, studies do not examine affective empathy, which would be difficult to measure. Rather, they tend to focus on cognitive empathy. In an unfortunate terminological development, this work sometimes refers to cognitive empathy as “affective Theory of Mind.” Both phrases refer to understanding another person’s emotional state, as opposed to sharing that state or understanding some element of the other person’s information processing. Another way of thinking about the issue is that most research in the area focuses on empathic accuracy. The accuracy of affective empathy is difficult to test. However, in most cases, one’s shared feelings with a target would be reflected in one’s cognitive empathic beliefs about the target’s emotions. If John feels empathic sadness for Sally, John almost certainly also believes that Sally is sad. Evaluating the accuracy of John’s belief, his cognitive empathy or affective Theory of Mind, seems a fairly reliable way of judging the accuracy of John’s affective empathy. This is not quite the end of the matter, since there may be different sorts of empathic accuracy, and one’s beliefs may represent a simplified version, not only of the target, but of one’s own emotional response. Nonetheless, it is an important starting point for the empirical study of literature and empathy. It is also worth noting that a number of studies are correlational and thus do not provide clear causal directionality. For example, readers of literary narratives tend to have better affective Theory of Mind (affective ToM) skills than other people matched for a range of relevant variables. However, the explanation could go in either direction. Readers may improve their affective ToM through practice with literary narratives, or they may be drawn to read literary narratives due to their prior skills in affective ToM. Some research does try to address this issue. However, I know of no longitudinal studies of this sort, research that traces the development of affective ToM over the course of long-term exposure to literary narratives, evaluated against control groups of other sorts of readers and non-readers. Rather, the studies that directly address the causal issue involve only short-term

Readers (II) 123 processes. Such studies are certainly not without value. They provide some evidence that reading literary narratives has short-term benefits in ToM. One may reasonably assume that these short-term effects would accumulate and stabilize over longer periods. But, as far as I am aware, that has not been established. Two other general points are worth making before we go on to consider a few examples. First, I have been referring to “literary narratives.” However, research on reading and empathy “too often conflates narrativity, fictionality and literariness,” as Koopman and Hakemulder point out in their extremely valuable overview and systematization of work in the area (80). Thus sometimes the research suggests that reading fiction produces ToM benefits. This might be a matter of initial attitude toward the work, whether one opens one’s emotional response to it as fiction or responds to it as fact. Koopman and Hakemulder point out that “there is evidence from neuropsychology that texts that are presented as fictional are processed differently than when the same texts are presented as factual” (88). Suzanne Keen argues that we empathize with fictions more readily because we in effect suspend our concern with pragmatic consequences for ourselves, our “alert suspicion of others’ motives” (168). This is different from the implications of research that suggests improved cognitive empathy comes from reading narrative—thus including biography and history, but not perhaps some lyric poetry or character vignettes. If narrative is the source of empathic effect, it may be a matter of taking up a role in particular situations and trajectories of simulated action, as indicated by Oatley (see “Taxonomy” and “Meetings”). Studies of both sorts tend to leave aside the topic of literary quality. If that too is a relevant variable, then it may be the case that empathic accuracy is fostered by works of Nobel laureates, but not by mass-market paperbacks. If so, this may be a function of the complexity and novelty of the particular situations and trajectories of events (e.g., the non-cliché quality and ambivalence of character motivations). Clearly, it makes a difference whether we view empathy as enhanced by literary narrative, literary fiction, any narrative, or any fiction. Finally, Koopman and Hakemulder distinguish two distinct but related research programs that are worth noting in this context. The first focuses on empathy proper and is the one with which we are centrally concerned. The other considers “self-reflection,” the process of becoming aware of and perhaps critical about previously unselfconscious presuppositions. Following Miall and Kuiken, Koopman and Hakemulder see this as a matter of defamiliarization. Personally, I am not convinced that defamiliarization is a precise enough theoretical

124  Readers (II) concept to do much explanatory work. However, it may begin to suggest a way of thinking about literature and egocentric bias. By making other minds “strange” but also comprehensible, a work might limit one’s inclination to projection. We obviously cannot consider the entire range of empirical studies of literature and empathy. In the remainder of this section, I will consider three exemplary cases. The first is a study headed by Raymond Mar, with Keith Oatley and others (hereafter, Mar, “Bookworms”). As the authors summarize, “Lifetime exposure to fiction and non-fiction texts was examined along with performance on empathy/social-acumen measures. In general, fiction print-exposure positively predicted measures of social ability, while non-fiction print-exposure was a negative predictor” (694). The idea of lifetime exposure to fiction already highlights one of the difficulties facing empirical researchers in this area. Just how does one determine such lifetime exposure? Self-reports are unreliable due both to memory error and impression management considerations (i.e., trying to present a positive image of oneself). The researchers opted for an author recognition test. They gave test subjects a list of real and fake authorial names and asked them to note the authors they had heard of. The procedure is well established and certainly more reliable than self-reports. In context, it is probably as reasonable a method as one could expect. But it is obviously at best only an indirect indicator of “lifetime exposure to fiction and non-fiction.” Since the summary is phrased in terms of fiction and nonfiction, it is important to note that the contrast was actually more complex. It was between fictional narratives and nonfictional expository works. As Mar and colleagues explain, “Great care was taken to ensure that Fiction authors [on the author identification list] wrote only narrative works, and that Non-fiction authors worked exclusively in a nonnarrative domain” (699). However, the former category included both “literary” and “popular” authors. Thus the research did not address the question of literary complexity or quality in relation to empathy or empathic accuracy. Mar and colleagues performed two main tests. The first was the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. Subjects are shown a letterbox photograph of eyes and asked to identify which of four mental states the target is experiencing. The second was the “Interpersonal Perception Task.” Subjects are shown a video of people interacting, then asked multiple-choice questions about relevant facts that are never explicitly mentioned in the video (e.g., “Who is the child of the two adults?”). It seems clear that the latter is much closer to our experience of Theory of Mind, including affective ToM, in the real world.

Readers (II) 125 Indeed, from a perspective outside experimental psychology, it seems a little difficult to say just what the Mind in the Eyes test tells us. This is important because the results indicate a correlation between lifetime fiction exposure and scores on the Mind in the Eyes test. The result was replicated, with manipulation of new variables, by Mar, Oatley, and Peterson. This does point to an enhancement of ToM, and probably affective ToM, thus empathic accuracy. That is all to the good, and a positive reason to promote literary study. However, it is complicated by the results of the other test. The Interpersonal Perception Test results are “positively associated with Fiction print-exposure” if the data are analyzed in a particular way. However, this “association was not statistically significant” (704). Moreover, even the enhancement suggested by the Eyes in the Mind test results are equivocal. Specifically, “causal direction cannot be inferred” (705). In short, this research presents some reason to view literature or narrative as beneficial for the cultivation of empathy. But it is far from unequivocal. Probably the most famous empirical study of the effects of literature on affective ToM is that of Kidd and Castano, published in Science in 2013. That study addressed a number of questions raised by the work of Mar and colleagues. First, Kidd and Castano did a series of five experiments that examined literary fiction in particular, contrasting it with popular fiction. Second, they addressed the causal sequence problem, clearly establishing that, in their study, increased empathic accuracy resulted from reading literary fiction, rather than increased empathic skills leading to more interest in literary fiction. Third, Kidd and Castano explicitly treated the relation between affective ToM and affective empathy. Thus, their conclusions bear not only on the manipulative skills that might go along with accurate ToM understandings; they bear as well on the ethical issues that are so important to the “training of sensibility” tradition and to contemporary critics. Specifically, they note that ToM “helps to support … empathic responses.” More important, they cite research indicating that “[t]he affective component of ToM”—thus the prime concern of their studies—“is linked to empathy (positively) and antisocial behavior (negatively)” (377). In other words, an increased “ability to detect and understand others’ emotions” (377) predicts increased empathy and decreased antisocial behavior. More exactly, in the first experiment, Kidd and Castano had participants read either literary fiction or nonfiction. They then administered the Mind in the Eyes test. They found that “[s]cores were higher in the literary fiction than nonfiction condition” (378). This broadly supports Mar and colleagues’ conclusions, but it does so in a way that

126  Readers (II) establishes causal sequence more firmly; on the other hand, there is the difference that Kidd and Castano establish short-term, not long-term effects. In the second experiment, Kidd and Castano turned to the relation between literary and popular fiction. They had participants read a selection of literary fiction or a selection of popular fiction or nothing. (Kidd and Castano discuss the difficulty of drawing this distinction, but defend it and present criteria for their choices. The various experiments treating this distinction drew on work by Anton Chekhov, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, and others in the literary category, with Dashiell Hammett, Robert Heinlein, Danielle Steele, and others representing the popular fiction category [see the “Supplementary Materials” for their article].) They then administered the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy test, an affective ToM measure that gives test subjects the target’s entire face. Kidd and Castano found that those who read literary fiction selections made fewer errors on this affective ToM measure. In contrast, reading popular fiction made “no difference” relative to reading nothing (378). The third experiment followed the literary versus popular contrast, but returned to the Mind in the Eyes measure. It found that “scores were higher in the literary fiction condition than in the popular fiction condition” (378–379). These results were replicated with variations in Experiments 4 and 5. As the authors summarize their findings, “Experiment 1 showed that reading literary fiction, relative to nonfiction, improves performance on an affective ToM task. Experiments 2 to 5 showed that this effect is specific to literary fiction” (379). The authors point out that their “findings demonstrate” only “the short-term effects of reading literary fiction.” However, they go on, the various research results “suggest that reading literary fiction may lead to stable improvements in ToM” (380). Kidd and Castano valuably extend the research program forwarded by Mar, Oatley, and others (for their subsequent work on this topic, see Kidd, Ongis, and Castano). But questions remain. I will mention only two. First, not all of the data suggest empathic benefits for literary study. As Oatley points out, in “2008 Willie van Peer reported a study of university students of science and of the humanities on a measure of emotional intelligence. There was considerable scatter, but on average the science students had higher emotional intelligence than the humanities students, the opposite of what was expected” (Such Stuff)—and the opposite of what is apparently predicted by the research of Oatley and his colleagues. Second, it seems clear that a great deal of literature inhibits empathy; literature may be racist, sexist, anti-Semitic,

Readers (II) 127 colonialist, homophobic, and so on. But outgrouping is largely left aside in research on the ethical benefits of literature. Returning to our initial division of research programs, we find that the studies we have considered also largely leave aside the issue of how literature might foster critical self-awareness. I will conclude this section with a brief reference to recent work by Angus Fletcher and John Monterosso, which addresses this topic. Specifically, Fletcher and Monterosso distinguish “two formal features” of free indirect discourse (FID), which represents a character’s speech or thought, but “indirectly,” thus from the point of view of the narrator. These features are the “pivot from the third person into the first,” and the “pivot back” (82). For example, they quote the following passage from Jane Austen’s Emma: “Emma … had no sooner an opportunity of being one hour alone with Harriet, than she became perfectly satisfied—unaccountable as it was!—that Robert Martin had thoroughly supplanted Mr. Knightley” (3.355). The idea is that “unaccountable as it was!” indirectly represents Emma’s thought, “unaccountable as it is.” The narrator pivots into first person at the start of the phrase and pivots out after the phrase. Fletcher and Monterosso designed parallel passages to be distributed among study participants. Half of the passages had greatlyenriched FID. The researchers then tested differences in the responses of participants who received the control passages and those who received the FID-enhanced passages. They asked a series of questions bearing to a great extent on identification and on ethical evaluation. Their conclusion is that pivoting out of FID fosters tolerance without fostering identification. For example, in reading about revenge, readers of FID-enriched passages were more likely to agree that “good people are capable of violent actions” (93). In other words, they were more tolerant. However, they were no more likely to say that they would ever “take the law into [their] own hands” (94). Fletcher and Monterosso suggest that pivoting out of first person helps readers to “check their egocentrism” (95). In our terms, it fosters self-criticism about egocentric bias. Fletcher and Monterosso’s article is thought-provoking. However, there are several ways in which their claims might be challenged. For example, it is not clear that an experience of identification while reading will necessarily lead a test subject to report that he or she would be likely to do the same thing as the character. More significantly, they claim that their study shows that sometimes “ToM is improved not by imaginatively closing the gap between our minds and others, but consciously acknowledging it” (95). But this is highly doubtful.

128  Readers (II) If we are self-critical about egocentric bias, that is likely to increase our tolerance only to the extent that we substitute some sort of genuine interpersonal understanding for that bias. We do not have greater understanding of others if we consider them to be incomprehensibly alien. Rather, we are better mind readers only to the extent that we improve our empathic response, whether that is cognitive or affective empathy. Successful ToM is, then, always a matter of “closing the gap.” It is just that, in the case of egocentric bias, we falsely assume that the gap has been closed when it has not been. Thus we need to acknowledge the gap before (not instead of) closing it. In short, these various studies suggest that we have at least some reason to believe literature enhances empathy. They also indicate that there may be differences in the ways specific techniques operate to foster empathy or related processes of self-reflection or self-criticism. However, the results of the research are equivocal, and little can be said to have been settled.

Literature and empathy: Theoretical analyses and pedagogical applications Empirical studies of the sort just outlined obviously bear on real readers. Theoretical treatments of literature and empathy take up both real and implied readers, though often without being explicit about the distinction. To some extent, the issue of the gap between a reader and a character is a matter of implied readership. Put somewhat crudely, authors expect some readers to begin with only a small empathic gap, requiring minimal empathic effort. They expect other readers to begin with a larger gap. Authors are, in addition, likely to believe some readers are simply beyond the pale, impervious to the empathic appeal of a given character or of the group to which he or she belongs. These differences are a matter of degree. But they do seem to form themselves into patterns. Suzanne Keen has articulated one way of systematizing these patterns in her three-fold typology of “strategic empathy.” Strategic empathy is, as the phrase suggests, the creation of empathy for a purpose, typically a political purpose. That purpose is in part a function of the implied reader. In other words, the purpose is a purpose for a particular audience. Keen’s first sort of strategic empathy is “bounded,” aimed at an in-group “stemming from experiences of mutuality, and leading to feeling with familiar others” (142). To some extent, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a book aimed at trans women. It portrays such routines of daily life as trying to conceal facial hair as well as such large political issues as dealing with harassment. To some

Readers (II) 129 extent, Binnie’s purpose here is to provoke a sense of recognition—a “Yes, exactly!” spoken by a reader under her breath. Bounded empathy of this sort is clearly a different thing from “ambassadorial strategic empathy,” which addresses members of specific out-groups “with the aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specific end” (142). Interestingly, one of the outgroups addressed by Binnie is the other part of the transgender community—trans men. Binnie—or rather her narrator—makes some general comments about trans men that are positive. But trans men are presented in the novel as a privileged group. For example, they are allowed into parties from which trans women are excluded. Moreover, the one trans man represented in the novel, Kieran, can easily be seen as arrogant and unsympathetic. It seems clear that Binnie is not appealing to the “Yes, exactly!” sentiments of trans men. But it would be a mistake to claim that she is simply excluding trans men from her implied readership. She is trying to appeal to them as well, trying to cultivate their empathy for the ways in which trans women come to be subjected to the sorts of discrimination experienced by trans men when their gender expression was female. On the other hand, this is not simply an empathic appeal. In keeping with the two research programs noted in the preceding section, we might distinguish two components to ambassadorial appeals in literature. On the one hand, there is the fostering of empathy across identity group divisions. On the other hand, there is a provocation toward self-criticism. I wrote above that Binnie is not attempting to elicit a “Yes, exactly!” response from her trans men readers. But she is trying to provoke another sort of familiarity, perhaps better represented as “Hmm, yeah (though I hate to admit it).” This is familiarity that provokes self-criticism. Unlike what is suggested by Fletcher and Monterosso, however, this self-criticism is not opposed to empathy; it is part of the cultivation of empathy, for its central purpose is to contribute to a (respectful) understanding of trans women. Having isolated two trends in ambassadorial appeals, we might wonder if there is a similar division in bounded appeals. The answer here is complicated, because any critical division can be viewed as establishing new identity categories, and a division in the implied readers’ identities would make this no longer a case of bounded empathy. In one sense, however, the answer is definitely “yes.” It is probably fairly rare for a literary work, at least a work of any complexity, to present only a happy self-affirmation for the in-group. Literature is not simply boosterism. Indeed, one of the most common purposes of appealing to in-group empathy is to foster in-group self-criticism on

130  Readers (II) some issue related to that empathy. For example, Binnie has one of her two main characters, Maria, discuss the tendency of trans women to establish dogmatic norms for thought and behavior: “just like any other community … it’s become this closed-off thing, with stuff it’s okay to talk about and stuff it’s not okay to talk about, perspectives you’re allowed to have and ones you’re not” (62). One of the main functions of the other main character, James, is to give an example of perspectives you’re not allowed to have, particularly on erotic motives for gender transition. Maria more or less dogmatically silences James on this topic, presenting a striking case of what Judith Butler calls a “regulatory regime” of gender (13). The interplay between self-criticism and bounded, strategic empathy seems clear in this case. Finally, Keen distinguishes “broadcast strategic empathy.” This “calls upon every reader to feel with members of a group, by emphasizing our common vulnerabilities and hopes” (142). Bounded and ambassadorial strategic empathy rely on divisions into identity groups. In contrast, broadcast strategic empathy repudiates in-group and outgroup, to affirm human commonality. This too has a component of recognitional empathy (the “Yes, exactly!” response, which is related to what I have elsewhere called, “situational identification” [Empire 254]), as well as a component of self-criticism. Basically, the recognitional empathy involves seeing the parallels between one’s own experience and that of the character, often a character representing some stigmatized group. The self-criticism is inseparable from the empathy, for it involves a discounting of the variable features, a setting aside of the cultural, historical, or merely individual particularity of one’s experience, a setting aside that opens up the possibility of recognizing parallels, both inferentially and in the simulation of emotional experience. This sort of accommodation to difference and consequent experience of (partial) sameness is not something that occurs within texts on their own. It is certainly a norm for the implied reader. But it takes us insistently toward real readers as well. This sort of complex process may be articulated in literary criticism. But it is often too personal to be well-suited for general distribution. It is, however, eminently suitable for pedagogical engagement with a work. One way of enhancing both self-criticism and empathy is through writing exercises in which students consider events and situations from the work in relation to their own, emotionally similar experiences. I recently taught Nevada in “Introduction to Literary Studies.” One essay option was to explore some parallel, but different experience in the students’ own lives. The idea was to engage them in thinking

Readers (II) 131 about ways in which they could cultivate their own feelings of recognitional empathy. For example, one student discussed Maria’s tendency to sink into self-blaming thoughts surrounding her transgender identity. He considered specific passages in the novel, relating them to his own struggle against chronic depression in high school, a struggle marked by the same sorts of self-blame, and one not unrelated to a sibling’s struggle over sexual orientation. In order to encourage students and to provide them with a model, I did the assignment myself. I discussed parallels between my experience of dealing with a diagnosis of Parkinsonism and Maria’s debilitating ruminations on being transgendered. I then went through the strengths and weaknesses of my essay with the class before students did their first drafts. Exercises of this sort may encourage empathic effort, potentially expanding the scope of our empathic response, both to the fictional target and, ideally, to parallel groups and individuals in the real world. The possibility is suggested by cases where cisgender readers of transgender autobiography have engaged in just this sort of search for parallels, as shown by fan letters sent to the early transgender “celebrity,” Christine Jorgensen (see Meyerowitz 96–97).

Notes 1 The idea has hardly gone uncriticized. See, for example, Gopnik (207) and Bloom ( Just 42–43). 2 Of course, there are other reasons as well. For detailed and influential arguments, see Prinz (“Is Empathy”) and Bloom (Against).

8 Texts (I) Storyworlds and stories

One of the most important distinctions in narrative theory is that between story and discourse, what is told and how it is told. We simulate the story based on the discourse along with prior knowledge, as well as our own more individual or idiosyncratic cognitive and emotional inclinations. This process of simulation has led some writers to claim that the literary work is a “joint creation” of the author and the reader (see Oatley, Such Stuff). This seems to me misleading. One reader’s particular simulation of a story is, in a sense, a co-creation of the author and that reader. But we commonly take the literary work— whether story or discourse—to comprise just those elements that are normative for the implied reader, elements that the real reader does not create (or co-create). The situation is comparable to any other set of instructions, to adopt Elaine Scarry’s idea (244). If I ask Jones how to get to the nearest grocery store, he gives me directions; it would be strange to say that we “co-create” these directions, even though I have to use simulation and memory processes to make the directions usable. In short, readers are necessary for realizing a story or discourse. But it seems wrong to say that they create or co-create either the story or the discourse, as we usually understand those terms. Thus we might speak of a particular reader’s imagination of a story. But it is also possible to speak of the properties of stories or discourses as such, independent of particular, putatively “co-creating” readers. It is, in other words, possible to focus on the text, even while recognizing that if a book blows open in the middle of an unpopulated forest, its printed marks will not make the sounds of words. In this and the following chapter, we consider some aspects of textuality, first focusing on stories (again, what is told), then turning to discourse (how the story is told). “Story” is often used broadly to refer to all normative or textually guided elements of the simulation by the implied reader. On the other hand, “story” is sometimes used more

Texts (I) 133 narrowly to refer only to events (including actions) and the causal relations among those events (including motivations for actions). In this narrower usage, “story” is distinguished from “storyworld.” The storyworld comprises the more enduring aspects of the simulation. Specifically, the storyworld has two components. First, there is the setting, the place and time in which the events occur. Second, there are characters, the human or non-human agents that initiate or experience events. We will consider these components of the storyworld before turning to the story in the narrow sense.

Setting Setting may seem an almost trivial topic. After all, isn’t the setting the mere background against which we view characters and events? Indeed, don’t adaptations show us that this background can be changed almost arbitrarily, as when Baz Luhrmann shifts Romeo and Juliet from Verona to Verona Beach, from Renaissance Italy to a modern city? If we are tempted to think in this way, however, we are misguided. One need only consider the differences between Luhrmann’s and Zeffirelli’s versions of Shakespeare to realize that setting may make a significant responsive difference, especially to the emotion of a work. For example, Zeffirelli stages the opening conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets in a bustling marketplace, suggesting a settled and largely cooperative society that the Capulets and Montagues disrupt. In contrast, Luhrmann places this conflict in a filling station, with its implications of a mobile lifestyle and suggestions of fast escapes, as well as threats of conflagration from stray matchsticks and spilled petrol. The memories fostered in the implied viewer differ also. Both films are made for a modern audience, and that audience brings different associations to Renaissance marketplaces and filling stations. Of course, differences in setting are not confined to the opening scene. Another obvious difference between the films is the use of nature as a setting. In Zeffirelli’s film, the human world may be settled and often cooperative, but it is also the location of violence; love is more obviously associated with verdant nature, at least in the crucial scene at Juliet’s window, where the lovers are almost lost in the lush greenery of the orchard. Luhrmann differs not only in giving the window scene a highly artificial setting, but more generally in presenting us with a more desolate and threatening version of nature, as in the dry field of Romeo’s exile. Moreover, it is a nature scarred by human detritus. Whereas Zeffirelli draws on a natural setting to foster

134  Texts (I) romanticism, Luhrmann does so to enhance discomfort, including the pain of attachment separation. As the preceding comments suggest, setting most obviously fosters mood. It creates a medium-term disposition to respond to events with a particular sort of emotion. It presumably does this by selectively directing our attention, priming certain memories, and rendering more likely certain sorts of hypothetical simulations or expectations. Of course, setting does not do this in isolation. It works with other aspects of the story and discourse. For example, stylistic features of the Romeo and Juliet adaptations, such as camerawork and editing, interact with setting to guide the implied viewer’s response. Interactions of this sort are more obvious when it comes to non-diegetic music (i.e., music that is not part of the storyworld, but rather part of the discourse). Tense music fosters one sort of construal and response to a dark scene; romantic music fosters a different sort of construal and response (cf. Jeff Smith). The idea is consistent with Keith Oatley’s account of scenes. Oatley suggests the importance of setting when he gives the subtitle, “Scenes in the Imagination,” to his chapter on literature and emotion (Such Stuff). Admittedly, “scene” is broader than setting. But the term itself suggests something more than just the story and its characters. Oatley goes on to maintain that “[m]ore or less deliberately, in the process of creation, a writer or filmmaker draws on his or her own set of resonances and inner associations, and explores ways of externalizing them into concrete images and scenes that may be juxtaposed in ways that resonate with readers and audiences” (Such Stuff). Moreover, drawing on ancient Indian aesthetic theory, Oatley contends that the “rasas,” or dominant emotional orientations pervading a work of art, “can be thought of as [memory] traces in people’s minds,” which are activated “by two means: literary characters and circumstances” (Passionate 36), the two components of the storyworld. Thus, Oatley suggests the importance of setting for the medium-term dispositions of mood. Setting of course interacts not only with features of discourse, but with character and story elements as well. Perhaps the most obvious case of this is story genre, which has been treated influentially in cognitive film theory. Specifically, Noël Carroll has developed the influential concept of criterial prefocusing (“Film” 30–33). Drawing on Carroll’s idea, we may say that genre knowledge alters our cognitive and emotional orientation toward a film or literary work. It prefocuses our attention, as well as our affective disposition—the latter being given in part by primed emotional memories, from art and from life. Consider the opening scene of a movie in which a young woman

Texts (I) 135 is walking alone on a dark suburban street at night. Even without the cue of music, we are likely to respond differently to this scene if it is a romantic comedy than if it is a slasher film. Cognitive literary and film theory such as that of Oatley and Carroll is one of the three theoretical orientations that are most obviously relevant to the study of setting and emotion. The others are certain forms of narratology, especially rhetorical narratology, and ecocriticism—though the relevant discussions are rarely framed in terms of storyworld setting.1 James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz are two of the most important and influential figures in rhetorical narratology. This branch of narratology “conceives of narrative as a purposive communicative act” (Phelan 203) and thus often stresses the audience or audiences for a literary work. In connection with this emphasis, Phelan and Rabinowitz write that “[a]udiences develop interests and responses of three broad kinds, each related to a particular component of the narrative: mimetic, thematic, and synthetic” (7).2 The mimetic concerns “characters as possible people” and “the narrative world as like our own.” The thematic bears on ethical, political, or similar “issues … addressed by the narrative.” Finally, the synthetic treats “the characters and … the larger narrative as artificial constructs” (7). Phelan and Rabinowitz make valuable points here. However, it may be best to organize things somewhat differently. Following Horace, the Arabic Aristotelians, and others, we might say that literature has two major or overarching aims—to convey thematic concerns (understood very broadly, but usually involving ethical or political goals), and to foster emotional responses. Thus it is not quite right to see the thematic as parallel to the mimetic and the synthetic. Nor is it right to leave out the emotional. Rather, theme and emotion should be understood as both providing purposes for the mimetic and synthetic aspects of narrative. Moreover, we might understand the mimetic and synthetic slightly differently as well. Setting might convey themes or foster emotions either directly or indirectly. For example, a landscape might directly invite aesthetic delight, whatever its place in the story. Alternatively, the emotional consequence of a setting may be a function of its relation to the story. For example, a place that is neutral in itself may indirectly provoke fear through the dangers it poses to the hero. More exactly, if a setting operates indirectly in theme or emotion, it may do so through the causal sequence of events that it enables or through patterns that are non-causal—for example, through contrasts with other settings. These alternatives allow us to partially redefine the mimetic as

136  Texts (I) story-mediated causal sequencing and the synthetic as a function of non-story patterning. Note that causal sequences of events need not be particularly realistic; they are “mimetic” in the sense that they concern “conceptually possible” variants on “the laws and limitations that govern the extratextual world” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 7). Again, in each case, mimetic and synthetic, the ultimate purposes of the setting are to contribute to the work’s thematic or emotional consequences. In their discussion of setting, Phelan and Rabinowitz stress the synthetic particularly. One of their examples, however, seems misplaced. Indeed, it seems to illustrate very well the ways in which setting may contribute to causal sequencing. Specifically, they explain that the river in Huckleberry Finn guides Huck and Jim’s journey “one way, in a preordained direction” (86). The point is brought home if we imagine a modern adaptation in which the two protagonists travel by hopping on freight cars, which allow passage in any direction. The trajectory of the river’s flow is clearly mimetic, with thematic and emotional as well as causal consequences. Nonetheless, Phelan and Rabinowitz seem right in devoting most attention to the synthetic operation of setting, which is often where setting does its most interesting emotional and thematic work—most interesting in the sense that it is less self-evident. Drawing on structuralist ideas and terminology, they particularly emphasize the “diacritic” or “contrastive” operation of setting (85). Specifically, they suggest that the basic operation of setting is not what we might call “intrinsic,” thus a matter of the properties of the setting in itself (as when we find a landscape beautiful), though there is of course an element of that in most cases. It is, more importantly, what we might call “systemic,” or, alternatively, “structural,” a matter of the relations among settings within a work or within a larger category, such as a genre. For instance, in Romeo and Juliet, the difference between Verona and Mantua is not principally a matter of anything intrinsic to those places. It is a matter of contrasting the place of the lovers’ union and the place of the lovers’ separation. Mantua is, fundamentally, not Verona. As structuralist analyses would suggest, we typically map setting contrasts onto thematic or emotional oppositions, and these mappings are crucial to the thematic and emotional operation of the settings. Perhaps the most fundamental emotional division of space is into home and not home, where “home” refers, as in the cliché, to “where the heart is.” Specifically, our relation to space seems to develop in some ways parallel to our relation with people. We bond with both. Indeed, Panksepp points out that place attachment is evolutionarily

Texts (I) 137 related to person attachment (407 n.93). It is also connected with person attachments. Banishment is painful for Romeo because Verona is the place of his primary attachment bonds. Place attachment is not the only emotion that bears on setting. However, it is a singularly important one. In keeping with this, place attachment has had a prominent role in ecocritical treatments of setting and emotion (see, for example, Weik von Mossner, “Ecocritical” 5, 6). The reason for this is straightforward in that a sense of bonding with natural spaces is often important to cultivating ecological sensitivities. So is a sense of beauty or aesthetic pleasure in nature (see, for example, David Ingram 32). Of course, beauty, like attachment, is important outside ecological contexts as well. It is a feature of setting that bears on emotion and theme in a range of works, most obviously many films. The same point may be made about ugliness, beautiful versus ugly being another form of categorical contrast that serves to organize spaces in literature. The mention of ugliness brings us to an important feature of affective ecocriticism. In keeping with many strands of critical theory— including Marxist, feminist, and post-structuralist—ecocriticism is not merely celebratory. It is also skeptical and self-critical. Thus it involves reference not only to the positive aspects of place attachment, but to its negative aspects as well. Like person attachment, place attachment can lead us to idealize the target of our feelings, ignoring faults and even our own ambivalence. In short, ecological sensitivity can spill over into sentimentalism (see, for example, Weik von Mossner, “Ecocritical” 2, 3, and David Ingram 32) or nostalgia, if the target of our attachment no longer exists or has taken a different form (Weik von Mossner, “Emotions” 47). Affective ecocritics are as likely to critically analyze sentimentalism and nostalgia as to celebrate place attachment and beauty. This balance between celebration and critique is evident in one of the most basic contrasts taken up in ecocritical treatments of setting, that between natural and built environments (see, for example, David Ingram 36). It would be easy to make this into a good nature versus bad artifact division, and that may in fact be the case for a particular story. But the categorical organization is more complex than that. It alerts us to a basic contrast, but it can be deployed in very different ways. Indeed, that is true of most, perhaps all such oppositions. Again, place attachment is not simply good, for it may be sentimental or nostalgic. The point holds for other contrasts of setting, such as that between masculine public space and feminine domestic space, as treated by Robyn Warhol. Feminine domestic space need not be

138  Texts (I) unequivocally positive, even in a work that we might consider feminist or proto-feminist. As Warhol points out, some of the most interesting aspects of setting concern not the basic opposition between private and public or even the relation of these to feminine and masculine. Rather, they concern “the gradations of difference within the feminine realm of the ‘private’” (93). In this, Warhol suggests that there may be contrasts within contrasts—and those contrasts may be multiple, not merely bipolar. There are, of course, many further aspects to the affective study of setting. For example, a broad range of emotions can enter into one’s relation to place, such as pride or shame, greed or gratitude. Unfortunately, we cannot explore these topics in a short book. Before continuing on to character, however, it is worth briefly considering some implications of the preceding points for our understanding of setting in Binnie’s Nevada. There are two main spaces in Binnie’s novel: New York and Star City, Nevada. Of course, at a more fine-grained level, there are many more local settings: Steph’s apartment, the bookstore, Burritoville, James’s apartment, the Star City Wal-Mart, and so on. A full analysis of the setting would have to take these into account. However, the title of the novel itself draws our attention to the larger contrast. New York and Star City contrast in a number of significant ways. This is not an opposition between a built environment and a natural environment. But it is not entirely unrelated. New York is a built, urban environment that incorporates some elements of nature in, for example, parks. In contrast, Star City is a built, semi-urban environment that is embedded within an encompassing nature. For most of history, the place was a “little stream dribbling down between two … little mountains” (137), until Wal-Mart was built around the stream in what appears to be a parody of ecologically sensitive architecture. The town gets its name from the vast canopy of stars above it at night, stars you can wonder at “[a]s long as you’re facing away from the Wal-Mart” (138). The contrast highlights the bustling, human life of New York, underscored by the repeated scenes of traffic, eateries, subways, and other public places. At the same time, it emphasizes the isolation of Star City, the desolate, depopulated landscape: “everybody … left for California” (137). The crowding life of New York contextualizes Maria, with her large transgender community; the isolation of Star City contextualizes James, with his sense of utter singularity. But things are not as simple as they seem. Maria has a community, but she explains to Steph that “I totally fucking hate everybody else who’s trans” (73). Her relationship with the people around her is well

Texts (I) 139 represented by the combination of setting and story when she rides her bike through traffic, trying to avoid collisions. She is close to people on all sides, but the closeness is merely physical. James is more physically isolated, like the setting in which he lives and acts, but perhaps not more emotionally isolated. This is related to an important way in which the two settings converge with one another. Neither of them is home. More technically, the implied reader’s character-mediated relation to these two spaces is never one of attachment fulfillment or even attachment loss. Maria and James have similar relations to place. It is never where one is together with others in meaningful interrelations. Place is, rather, simply a context for being alone. It would represent a searing loneliness for them, if they had ever experienced the feeling of connection that would let them know what they were missing. That loneliness is perhaps the emotion most importantly suggested by the settings in Nevada.

Characters Character may be the most obvious area in which emotion arises in literature, for two reasons. First, readers have emotional responses to characters, and even the actions and events of a story typically have their emotional impact in relation to characters. For example, most audience members do not simply want to see some male-female union in Romeo and Juliet. They want to see the union of Romeo and Juliet; the union of Paris and Juliet just won’t do. The second reason for the affective importance of character is related. We want to see Romeo and Juliet united in part because we have feelings about them, but also in part because they have feelings about one another, if admittedly only in our simulation. Within the storyworld, emotion does not reside in scenes or events as such, but in things that feel—which is to say, characters. In keeping with this broad division, many discussions of character and emotion treat reader or, more broadly, recipient emotion, while others tend to focus on character emotion. To a considerable extent, examinations of recipient emotion take up empathy and sympathy, topics we have already considered. There are also related treatments of Theory of Mind, which have obvious implications for the study of literature and emotion, even if those implications have not been extensively explored. For example, in her very influential work, Lisa Zunshine has examined the operation of Theory of Mind in our understanding of characters, particularly our understanding of characters’ own social understanding, which is to say, their Theory of Mind processes. Clearly, this includes emotional understanding, and is connected with empathic response.

140  Texts (I) An interesting development of Theory of Mind work may be found in Richard Gerrig’s account of the ongoing processes of recipient response to literature, including “spontaneous trait inferences” (360): for example, inferences to affective dispositions and attitudes. Gerrig writes that “[f]ictional characters are often introduced by their behaviors, rather than by explicit mention of the traits that (potentially) generate those behaviors” (360). Gerrig goes on to explain that, “under appropriate circumstances readers automatically (or spontaneously) encode trait inferences based on characters’ behaviors” (361). For instance, we may quickly categorize Tybalt as an under-modulated “hothead,” even before we are explicitly told anything about his personality. Such categorization guides our anticipation and retrospective judgment, as well as our ongoing construal of character intentions— thus what we expect of Tybalt, how we understand his past actions, and how we interpret his behavior in the present. In each case, the categorization will affect what we conclude from ambiguous or incomplete information and how we respond to it. Beyond empathy and Theory of Mind, other forms of character analysis have implications for emotion study as well. For example, Uri Margolin, one of the most influential writers on character, has pointed out that characters have different modes of existence (see his “Characters”). Indeed, even one character has different modes of existence in a single work. This, too, inflects our emotional response. In reading Nevada, we react not only to what Maria actually does, but to what she imagines or anticipates doing (e.g., taking heroin), says she has done (e.g., in fabricating aspects of her road trip for James), and conjectures about herself (e.g., in wondering about childhood trauma). Moreover, in each of these cases, we may respond to the relation between the “real” Maria and the conjectural, hypothetical, counterfactual, or other Maria. There is a rich literature on character that bears on both recipient response and character emotion.3 That work has, however, been somewhat diffuse, as the preceding comments may suggest. In their introduction to Characters in Fictional Worlds, Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider try to bring some order to this field of research. They isolate “four dominant paradigms” in theorizing character. These are hermeneutic, psychoanalytic, structuralist and semiotic, and cognitive. By “hermeneutic,” they mean the approach that treats characters “as representations of human beings.” By “structuralist and semiotic,” they mean approaches that “highlight the very difference between characters and human beings” (5). By “psychoanalytic,” they mean based on psychoanalysis. By “cognitive,” they mean based on cognitive science.

Texts (I) 141 Though it is easy to understand why the editors chose this fourfold schema, it is somewhat problematic. For example, psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches commonly treat characters as representations of human beings; they simply assume different principles of psychology from one another and from more intuitive, folk psychological versions of the hermeneutic approach. Thus, the fundamental contrast here is between hermeneutic and structuralist or, to use Phelan’s more general terms, the mimetic and the synthetic. In other words, the basic division in accounts of character is parallel to that in accounts of setting. In the case of character, it is a matter of understanding characters as persons with human psychology or examining more mechanistic patterns, basically patterns without individual subjectivity. In addition to Phelan, Rabinowitz, Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider, many other writers have drawn a distinction of this general sort. For example, in Narrative Fiction, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan phrases the alternatives as “people or words” (33). The mimetic category includes three common theoretical approaches: folk psychology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science. The synthetic category has often relied on structuralism and semiotics. However, both have involved other theoretical systems as well—including historically specific psychologies, relevant to affective historicism. For example, Renaissance medicine typologizes characters in terms of the humors, which may be viewed as part of mimetic or synthetic characterization, depending on one’s beliefs and the degree of complexity with which the characters are developed. More recently, psychoanalysis has yielded character typologies in relation to, for example, psychosexual stages (oral, anal, and so on). Whatever the theoretical orientation, mimetic approaches tend to treat both general dispositions and particular, circumstantial motivations or elicitors—what a character is generally inclined to do and what provokes a particular behavior more proximately—as we would expect from our overview of affect and emotion. Synthetic approaches to character often stress character type (e.g., Vice or buffoon) or story function (e.g., helper or opponent). These are roughly non-mimetic parallels to dispositions (type) and particular motivations (story function). The mimetic and the synthetic need not be considered mutually exclusive accounts of character. They may be understood as differentiating kinds of character within a single analysis. For example, E. M. Forster’s famous opposition between “round” and “flat” characters (103) might be rephrased in these terms. The former are full human beings, thus mimetic, while the latter are mere mechanisms or types, thus synthetic. More recently, Ralf Schneider has drawn on Richard

142  Texts (I) Gerrig’s work to explore the difference between processes of categorization and processes of personalization. In categorization, characters are reduced to instances of prior schemas—an obvious case would be social (e.g., racial) stereotypes.4 In personalization, however, characters are developed with complex individuality. Indeed, the mimetic and synthetic are not mutually exclusive even for a single character. Often, it makes sense to speak of a character, and emotional considerations bearing on that character, in terms of both individuality and typology. In fact, literary works routinely combine types with individual psychologies. Every time we engage in automatic trait inference (as treated by Gerrig), we categorize a character and thus to some extent make him or her into a type. Moreover, we do precisely the same thing with real people, whom we also treat sometimes as subjects and sometimes as patterned mechanisms. Frequently, this is reductive on our part. Such reduction is particularly likely when we define people by group identity (e.g., race or religion). But, in the case of both characters and people, categorization does not preclude personalization. Consider, for example, Tybalt. On the one hand, he is a stock character, defined by his choleric disposition in terms of humoral medicine. There is also a hint of the miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier character type, particularly in Benvolio’s account of his ineffectual furies: “He swung [his sword] about his head and cut the winds,/Who nothing hurt withal hissed him in scorn” (I.i.107–108). But that synthetic categorization is complicated by Shakespeare’s suggestion that Tybalt suffers from acute shame over his own subordinate place in the Capulet household, manifest in Capulet’s demeaning address to him as “boy” (I.iv.197, 204), and shame over what he perceives as threats to the status of his entire Capulet in-group, as in his construal of Romeo’s presence at the party as mockery (I.iv.175–176). Tybalt’s personalization (in Schneider’s term) or individualization is to a great extent a function of emotional complexity. Such complexity is largely a matter of conflict. People are conflicted; generally, types are not. This conflict may occur between an initial emotional response and a meta-emotional modulation or between different emotion systems in initial ambivalence. As to the former, our evaluation of a character often depends on the extent to which he or she is or is not able to modulate emotions. Again, Tybalt simply modulates too little. An interesting case of modulation concerns Romeo’s response to Mercutio’s death. Clearly, this is under-modulated by the laws of Verona. However, audience members might have seen Romeo as inhumanly over-modulated if he did not respond with violence to the

Texts (I) 143 death of his friend. Of course, Romeo’s emotionally complex individuality is not solely a matter of modulating violence. It is also a matter of ambivalence—in this case, a combination of anger and guilt in his response to Tybalt. Romeo played a central, albeit unintentional role in Mercutio’s death: he interfered in the fight and may be seen as responsible for its outcome. Indeed, this may lead at least some audience members to view him as insufficiently self-critical, thus insufficiently self-modulated in that rather different way. In keeping with these points, but adding further nuances, White and Rawnsley stress the importance of “multiple emotional states present simultaneously, either within an individual as ‘mixed emotions,’ or between different characters … or between characters and the audience (‘dramatic irony’)” (241). They go on to maintain that ambivalence or, more generally, “discrepant emotional awareness,” is “arguably what makes Shakespearian affective encounters still plausible as explanations of complex human behaviour” (261). The idea is continuous with the view that a key emotional operation of narrative is not simply provoking and guiding single emotions, but managing ambivalence (see my How 42). Perhaps the most significant sort of ambivalence is found in “masking,” particularly of the sort treated by Pandit (as discussed in Chapter 3). Needless to say, emotional considerations do not bear solely on mimetic approaches to character or mimetic aspects of character. Character role and character type also have emotional resonances. Character role is most often formulated in terms of story function. There is a hero whose pursuit of some goal defines the main action of the narrative; there are helpers who aid the hero in that pursuit, and so on. This sort of analysis makes sense and is of course appropriate for literary study. But it seems rarely acknowledged that those story functions are usually inseparable from emotions, both the emotions of characters and those of recipients. In the following section, we will consider an account of narrative structure that is based largely on character emotions. Here we might note that our parsing of character roles is often inseparable from our own emotional response to characters. The hero is not only the character whose concerns organize the causal trajectory of the story. He or she is, in the usual case, the character with whom we empathize or sympathize, and the character whose concerns provoke our liveliest sense of interest. Moreover, depending on genre, our empathic response to the hero may be modulated by feelings of admiration, e.g., for fortitude, physical prowess, or stoicism of which we ourselves would be incapable. Foil characters serve not only to draw our attention to character information, but

144  Texts (I) also to enhance admiration or other emotional responses. When not inflected by admiration, our empathic response may be intensified by feelings of identification, at least in the minimal sense of seeing the hero as similar to oneself, which may foster the fuller activation of emotional memories. Of course, a reader’s empathy and admiration are not sufficient to make a character the hero of a story. Sometimes real readers find themselves caring more about the fate of a peripheral character than about the main protagonists. On the other hand, in cases of this sort, we would not say that the peripheral character is the hero of the story, even for that particular reader. Indeed, empathy or sympathy is also not a necessary condition for making a character the main protagonist— though when such feelings are normatively absent (i.e., when we are not supposed to empathize or sympathize with the protagonist), we would probably not refer to this character as the hero. In any case, despite these qualifications, for the great majority of stories, we would probably say that something is amiss if readers do not respond to the main protagonist with empathy, sympathy, admiration, or identification. In short, emotional response, at least the normative response of the implied reader, is usually central in defining the character role of hero. Similar points apply to other character roles. Opponents of the hero tend to provoke feelings of frustration and resulting anger in recipients. Or, rather, they tend to provoke these when they pose a serious threat to the hero or to the hero’s achievement of goals. In other cases, they may provoke our ridicule or some other attitude. In connection with this, much of our sense of just how to characterize an opponent is a matter of how we feel about that opponent. If we feel anger, then we are likely to judge him or her differently and to hope for different outcomes than if we feel comic disdain for his or her bumbling incompetence—or if we feel a grudging respect for him or her, or contempt (e.g., at the deceit that characterizes some “false heroes”). Differences of these sorts are often a matter of genre. But of course, the difference in genre does not simply precede and determine the emotional response. Rather, our emotional response—that of real recipients or implied readers, or both—in part guides genre characterizations. The relevance of emotion is no less obvious in the case of other, more ancillary characters. The helper is inseparable from a sense of gratitude on the part of the hero and empathic or sympathetic gratitude on the part of the implied reader. Indeed, this may be normative not only for the implied reader, but for the hero as well. Part of our emotional response to the hero may concern his or her relations of gratitude.

Texts (I) 145 A still more straightforward case may be found in Northrop Frye’s “buffoon,” “whose function is to increase the mood of festivity rather than to contribute to the plot” (175). Similarly, the “suppliant”— “who presents a picture of unmitigated helplessness and destitution” (Frye 217)—operates to provoke pity or compassion. These cases are particularly interesting because their emotional function is not confined to the character himself or herself. Part of the operation of the suppliant, for example, is to affect the overall mood of the work or a particular section of the work. The buffoon and the suppliant are ambiguous between role and type. Character types are defined not by their story function, but by a set of relatively fixed properties. The relation of types to emotion is often so evident as to not merit comment. For example, the buffoon, understood in this case as a character type, should provoke mirth. If he or she does not, then something has gone wrong; the norms of the implied reader have not been satisfied. What is more significant is that some character types change with different emotional responses. Like social stereotypes, character types are an amalgam of information and affect and often have different versions. For example, white American stereotypes of African-American men include mugger and athlete. Both tend to reduce black men to embodiments of extraordinary physical force. But their social and evaluative implications are obviously different. The precise version of a stereotype activated in any particular context is to some extent the result of the prior emotion of the person thinking in terms of the stereotype, whether author or reader.5 A particularly interesting case of emotion affecting character typology may be found in Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of the Vice character type, “the great subversive figure of the moralities” (i.e., the morality plays) that “was never far from Shakespeare’s creative mind.” The key point for our present discussion is that the Vice character can be linked with either mirth or fear, sometimes in combination with disgust. Greenblatt explains that Shakespeare regularly manipulated this ambivalence. “At times,” Greenblatt explains, Shakespeare “greatly intensified the fear,” as in the case of the seductive Iago. “At other times,” Greenblatt continues, “he greatly intensified the laughter,” as with the mischievous Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At least to some extent, this duality is just what we see in the case of Tybalt, a dangerous disrupter of social order, and Mercutio, a raucously bawdy defiler of social decorum. The difference is presumably related to the area in which the social disruption occurs—violence in the former case; sexuality in the latter. Here, too, we see that emotion is crucial

146  Texts (I) to character, though in a more unexpected way. Moreover, an awareness of the relation in this case helps us to understand and respond to character more fully, both in general and in particular works, such as Romeo and Juliet.

Events and stories There are many ways of treating emotions and events or stories. For example, events themselves are arguably defined—picked out from the continuum of ongoing social and physical processes—by the contours of our emotional responses (see Chapter 1 of my Affective). Moreover, events have emotional precedents, consequences, and concomitants. Trajectories of events or stories also involve emotion at many levels and in many different respects. However, here, as with every other topic covered in the present volume, constraints of space require selection. Genre is one important area in which emotion is central to story structure. In The Mind and Its Stories, Affective Narratology, and elsewhere, I have argued that a limited number of story structures recur across a range of independently developing traditions of orature and literature, perhaps across all traditions of sufficient size and diversity. More important for our present purposes, I have argued that the large categories of these structures are defined by human emotion systems, and the prototypical forms of these structures can be explained by reference to simple processes of emotion intensification. In the remainder of this chapter, I will sketch this account of narrative genre. We need to begin with a few basic principles. First, we produce and receive categories—thus understand sets of objects—principally though not exclusively by reference to prototypical or standard cases, rather than necessary and sufficient conditions or rules (see Rosch for a concise account of prototypes). Thus story categories, including the category of “story” itself, are produced and understood principally through prototypes (not through the more abstract, rule-like conditions favored by structuralists). Second, a prototypical story involves a character pursuing some goal. That goal is itself some particularization of the desire for happiness. Put simply, we seek what we think will make us happy. As Kurtz, Wilson, and Gilbert explain in their discussion of “affective forecasting,” “the decisions we make depend largely on predictions of future happiness or heartbreak” (15). Third, happiness goals are defined by emotion systems. Thus the main types of goal pursuit in stories are defined by the main types of satisfaction of emotion systems. Fourth, these emotion systems include attachment, sexual desire, shame, anger, hunger, disgust, wonder or admiration,

Texts (I) 147 and guilt. These systems may operate separately or in conjunction to produce goals. Fifth, in the usual case, the recipient of the story empathizes or sympathizes with the protagonist, commonly sharing in his or her desire for the goal through empathy. Sixth, simple principles of emotion intensification will render stories more emotionally rewarding for the recipient, just as they will enhance the happiness achieved by the hero. The implication of these six principles, borne out by research on stories across cultures, is that standard story structures will form classes (or categories) defined by goals derived from emotion systems, and that the development of those structures will prototypically follow principles of emotion intensification. Most of the preceding points are probably clear enough without extensive elaboration. For example, to say that sexual desire defines a happiness goal is simply to say that one wants to have sexual relations with the target of one’s sexual desire. However, the principles of intensification require some spelling out. The key point about these principles is simply that our emotional responses are governed by a number of factors beyond the obvious impact of situations on goal achievement. Crucially, “people … respond emotionally to relative changes rather than to absolute consequences of their decisions” (Han and Lerner 111). One of the key relative changes is the gradient of emotion alteration, whether from actual experience to actual experience, expectation to experience, or some other variant. Suppose I am called into my department head’s office. He then proceeds to talk with me about some trivial matter of scheduling. If I worried that he was going to tell me about a student complaint, then I feel relief and perhaps even a degree of happiness at the outcome. If I anticipated an announcement that he was nominating me for an award, then I feel disappointment and even a degree of sadness at the outcome. But note that in each case the outcome itself is the same. The general point is suggested, from a different angle, by the observation of Ortony, Clore, and Collins that “increases in effort tend to increase the degree to which goals are positively valued” (73). A more uncertain and difficult goal tends to be more rewarding, once achieved. Following this general principle, we would expect an intensification of the outcome emotion in a story to be preceded by a relatively steep gradient of change. Thus the model predicts that a love story will be more effective to the extent that the lovers seem doomed to separation before they are united. If Lawrence and Laurel fall in love and their parents are delighted, the recipient of their story is only moderately glad to hear that they got married and lived together happily. In contrast, suppose we are told that Ken and Kendra have fallen in love,

148  Texts (I) but Kendra’s parents want her to marry Bruce; they threaten to disinherit her if she goes ahead with marrying Ken. Moreover, Kendra’s father works for the IRS and has initiated an investigation of Ken’s tax returns. It is much more of a relief and joy to learn that things work out for Ken and Kendra. Storytellers in different traditions learn this very quickly. It provides the basic trajectory for all the cross-cultural genres. It makes the basic story structure “tragi-comedy,” because the middle of the comedy commonly suggests tragedy. For example, in love stories, the lovers are not only separated, but there may be rumors or imagery of death or other irrecuperable loss. There are several other intensification principles that are often aligned with this basic principle of intensification by contrast, as we might call it. For example, as we saw in connection with setting, we tend to organize space by reference to emotion—feared and safe places, aesthetically pleasing and aesthetically repulsive places, and so on. Perhaps the most important division is into places for which we feel attachment bonds (which also tend to be places where we feel safe and places we find aesthetically pleasing), and places bereft of such bonds—home and alien places. This is a fundamental division of space in stories as well as in our lives. When connected with the principle of intensification by contrast, it leads us to expect that the middle part of a story, the tragedy of tragi-comedy, will be linked with spatial alienation, while the happy conclusion will be connected with home. This is just what we find in the prototypical forms of most cross-cultural genres. It appears most commonly in the exile and return of the protagonist, a recurring element in such stories. Another intensification principle of this sort involves exacerbating conflict by making it violate attachment bonds. Betrayal is more hurtful when it involves someone we had particular reason to trust—as when a brother, not some stranger, usurps the hero’s rightful position in the heroic plot or when the parents, not some outsiders, prevent the lovers’ union. This too contributes to prototypical structures in the cross-cultural genres. Having mentioned tragedy and comedy, it is important to note briefly that this theory makes comedy the basic form of every genre. This simply means that the overall aim of a protagonist’s goal pursuit is comic. Heroes do not set out to be defeated; the tragic separation of lovers is made tragic by the comic vision of their (now impossible) union. In keeping with this, it does seem to be the case that comedy is the more ordinary story form across cultures, arising spontaneously in all sufficiently large traditions. Tragedy, in contrast, seems to arise more rarely (for discussion of this point, see my The Mind 103–104).

Texts (I) 149 Of course, this still leaves open the question of why we have tragedy at all. But that is an issue that all theories have to deal with, whether they posit comedy as fundamental or not (for my account of tragedy, see How 8–10). Three genres stand out as perhaps the most common across cultures—romantic, sacrificial, and heroic tragi-comedy. In addition, there are genres that appear in unrelated traditions, but with less frequency and regularity, including family separation and reunion, seduction, revenge, and criminal investigation stories. Restrictions of space prevent us from considering all these genres in detail. However, we can consider a few of them. Romantic tragi-comedy combines the attachment system, sexual desire, and the reward system (the system that governs seeking and liking) to produce the goal of enduring, securely attached, sexually active union with a beloved. The combination of systems appears to give unusual force to this goal and thus to explain the frequency of the genre. Commonly, a romantic story begins with two people falling in love. Due to the principle of intensification by contrast, they encounter obstacles to their union. Due to the principle of intensification of conflict by attachment, the obstacles often involve parents. The parents may favor a rival, embedding a love triangle story within the separated lovers story. Due to the intensification of conflict through space, one of the lovers is often sent into exile. As a further development of contrast, there is often imagery of death or some suggestion of death separating the lovers permanently. Sometimes one or both lovers achieve some success that alters the parents’ view or otherwise facilitates the union of the lovers. Sometimes the union is the result of some helper figure. The union is commonly accompanied by an idealized reconciliation of the families and the larger society. It should be obvious immediately that Romeo and Juliet is a highly prototypical romantic story, except of course for the fact that it is a tragedy. The protagonists fall in love, but are immediately thwarted by the antagonism of their parents. When Capulet engages Juliet to Paris, introducing the love triangle plot, the intensification of conflict through an attachment relation becomes highly salient, since Capulet in effect threatens to renounce his attachment bond with Juliet. The separation of the lovers is intensified by Romeo’s exile. Moreover, Romeo himself makes clear that this exile is principally a matter of attachment loss: “There is no world without Verona walls,/But purgatory, torture, hell itself … Heaven is here,/Where Juliet lives” (III.iii.18–19, 30–31). When they are separated, there are false rumors of Juliet’s death, as well as imagery of death as she is entombed. Finally, the conclusion

150  Texts (I) of the story is the reconciliation of the families and the larger society. In short, the play gives us almost all the prototypical elements of romantic tragi-comedy—with the obvious exception of the union of the lovers. What are we to make of this? Shakespeare seems to have gone out of his way to create a play that would lead to a comic conclusion, most obviously in making Juliet’s apparent death unreal. In part, this is a matter of emotional intensification. The audience realizes that Juliet will revive, thus that the story is tending toward comedy. This anticipation of comedy is obviously the opposite of cases where the audience worries that one of the lovers really has died, which might prepare them for an intensified response to a comic revelation that both lovers are alive. Juliet’s false death, in contrast, is a way of enhancing the tragic emotion. However, there is something else going on here. Shakespeare has actually combined several genres in Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, it is arguably part of his genius that he was able to combine them with such naturalness. Perhaps the most obvious addition to the love story here is a somewhat minimal story of revenge. Shakespeare took up the principle of social opposition that commonly prevents the lovers from being united, making it into a sort of civil war, thus to some extent modeling it on the heroic genre. That development facilitated his simulation of precisely the sorts of event that initiate revenge plots. Specifically, revenge stories are prototypically guided by the emotion systems of shame and anger over attachment loss. That attachment loss appears most often in either of two forms. One is sexual betrayal, where the unfaithful beloved and/or his or her lover (or ravisher) is the target of revenge (as in Othello, with the caveat that of course there has not actually been betrayal in this case). The other common form of attachment loss involves the murder of an attachment figure (as in Hamlet). Shakespeare integrates a very minimal version of this genre at two places. First, there is Tybalt’s murder of Mercutio, avenged immediately by Romeo, with clear emphasis on both the anger and the shame—in this case, shame over being inadequately masculine in enabling the murder (“O sweet Juliet,/Thy beauty hath made me effeminate” [III.i.111–112]). Second, there is the much less prototypical case of killing the rival in the love triangle, Paris. The key point for this genre in relation to Romeo and Juliet is that the revenge narrative rarely turns out well. Revenge tends to trap the hero in a cycle of violence that ultimately leads to his or her own destruction (see Chapter 4 of my Affective). It is not accidental that the tragic result of Romeo and Juliet derives not from the love story per se, but from the revenge

Texts (I) 151 plot that is integrated with it. This has the Aristotelian consequence that we can see Romeo’s death as the result of his own tragic error— whether that of enabling the death of Mercutio or killing Tybalt or both. The death of Paris serves principally to recall Romeo’s violence and earlier revenge. But what about Juliet? She seems to be wholly innocent. Her death might therefore appear pointless. If so, it should harm the emotional effect of the work. Here, the sacrificial structure enters. The sacrificial narrative is guided by the emotion systems of guilt and moral disgust, as well as anger, wonder, and in many cases, hunger. (The following account of the sacrificial plot is slightly different from that given in The Mind and Its Stories and Affective Narratology.) To understand how this works, we need to outline the genre, which is most familiar to Western readers from the Christian story of the fall and redemption of humanity. The social in-group lives under certain divinely ordained rules. Due to some out-group seduction (e.g., the serpent in the Garden), these rules are violated, either by members of the society generally or by some representatives of the society (e.g., its ruler). This sin leads to divine punishment, often in the form of famine (hence the hunger system). The devastation can be ended only by a sacrifice that substitutes for the punishment. That sacrifice commonly takes one or both of two forms. When based on feelings of disgust and anger, it involves the purging of the sinners, prominently the out-group seducer and/or an in-group betrayer; when based on feelings of guilt and wonder, it involves the sacrifice of an innocent in-group member, often one that is idealized, such as Jesus. The result of the sacrifice is divine forgiveness and the consequent restoration of social health, commonly in a utopian form: e.g., when the devastation is famine, the restoration is likely to involve abundance of natural fertility. Shakespeare in effect embeds the romantic story of Romeo and Juliet within a sacrificial story. The devastation of the society is not the result of hunger, but rather the result of violence. The violation of rules is not so much divine as human, though there are obviously divine precedents for the secular laws against murder that appear to be routinely violated in Verona. By saying that the laws are “routinely violated,” I am pointing to the widely diffused guilt shared by the populace. On the other hand, there is also a seducer figure in the form of Tybalt, who is unusually provocative of social violence in the play. He is purged through the revenge plot, but that does not resolve the problem. It is, rather, the sacrifice of the innocent Juliet, as well as the death of Romeo, that ends the violence and leads to the familial and social reconciliation that ends the play. The point is explicit right

152  Texts (I) from the outset. The prologue itself announces that Romeo and Juliet “with their death bury their parents’ strife” (line 8). Indeed, this opening makes the point of the play sacrificial rather than romantic. The genre connection is enhanced by the resonances of Jesus’s passion and resurrection in Juliet’s story—from the Gethsemane-like night when she takes the poison (for this connection, see my What 106) to her resurrection in the tomb two days later (IV.i.106, as Jesus arose two days after the crucifixion). We could almost go so far as to say that the overall story is a sacrificial tragi-comedy of the reparative or “penitential” sort in which the restoration results principally from the sacrifice of an innocent scapegoat, with the tragic middle provided by an embedded romantic story (on this terminology, see my Understanding Nationalism 265–266). In keeping with this, the ending merges the sacrificial conclusion with the social aspect of the romantic conclusion as the parents finally reconcile themselves to the lovers’ choice, thereby integrating the two genres. These are perhaps some of the reasons Romeo and Juliet has been such a successful work.

Notes 1 For a valuable overview of affective ecocriticism that bears directly on the concerns of this section, see Weik von Mossner, “Ecocritical”; see also her recent book, Affective Ecologies. For a range of affective scientific issues bearing on ecological concerns, see Slovic and Slovic. 2 Unless otherwise noted, citations of Phelan and Rabinowitz, Warhol, and Herman refer to Herman and colleagues. 3 For a useful survey of research on fictional character, see Heidbrink. 4 On the relation between character types and social stereotypes, see, for example, Schweinitz; the two are not equivalent, but they do overlap. 5 On the relation of stereotyping to emotion, see my Culture of Conformism 129–134 and citations therein; on some of the complexity of this relation, see Forgas.

9 Texts (II) Discourse and style

We ended the last chapter with a comment on the success of Romeo and Juliet and its possible relation to genre elements of the play. But of course, the obvious reason for the work’s enduring popularity is its great verbal beauty. This is a matter of verbalization and style. Perhaps less obviously, this success also derives from what parts of the story are presented and when they are presented. For example, Shakespeare does not take us along on the messenger’s aborted journey to Mantua, nor give us access to the thoughts and aspirations of Rosaline. In addition to these ellipses, there are redundancies. He gives us the information about Romeo’s exile directly before repeating it with Juliet’s response and repeating it again with Romeo’s response. This is all part of the work’s discourse. Again, discourse is the manner in which story and storyworld information is conveyed. It is divisible into plot or emplotment (the making of a story into a plot) and narration. Emplotment comprises the selection and organization of story information. In other words, the key features of emplotment are the provision and withholding of information and the arrangement of that information. The selection of information may be conveyed through direct statement or direct representation (on stage or in film), logical implication, implicit suggestion, or other means. It includes “construal,” thus the aspects of a situation or event as they are conveyed by specific phrasing: e.g., whether a particular event is presented as “a loud, repeated noise” or “the sound of chopping wood.” The organization of that information is a matter of both temporal sequence (e.g., chronological order versus the use of flashbacks) and salience (e.g., whether a particular story fact is foregrounded or backgrounded). Selection and organization necessarily involve some agent. In reality, this is, of course, the author. But there is often, perhaps always, within the narrative itself, a suggested perspective guiding the emplotment.

154  Text (II) That is the perspective of the narrator. Or, rather, it is always possible to distinguish a narratorial perspective in principle. In any given case the narrator might be virtually identical with the implied author, who may in turn be indistinguishable from the real author. On the other hand, the narratorial perspective might be restricted directly (due to the narrator’s own limitations) or indirectly, through the knowledge or interests of a character in the story (in focalization). In addition, the expression of the narratorial perspective may be limited or oriented by address to a narratee. Neither sort of limitation applies to the implied or real author. In addition to plot and narration, we may wish to distinguish a third component of discourse—verbalization, or more generally, sensory manifestation (e.g., through recorded images in film). There is some medium through which the narrated and emplotted story and storyworld are accessible to the recipient. We do not have direct, intellectual intuition of the narrative, but encounter words, sounds, or images—representations—by which we simulate and understand (or misunderstand) that narrative with its various components. It might initially seem that verbalization or sensory manifestation is part of emplotment, or perhaps narration. This is in part true, but the situation is complicated, and for practical purposes it is valuable to treat the category separately. Specifically, there are different aspects of verbalization that we may wish to treat as part of narration or emplotment (as in the preceding observations about construal) or to separate from both. For example, one aspect of verbalization is its linguistic profile, including whether or not it is in an identifiable dialect. This may bear on narration (e.g., if the narrator comes from Mississippi). But it might equally bear on the author. To some extent, the verbalization in one of Faulkner’s novels is a function of the narrator’s voice. But to some extent it is a function of Faulkner’s own style. The latter is often crucial for important aspects of the work, most obviously including its verbal beauty, which is usually understood as a matter of authorial style (or, more technically, implied authorial style). When Shakespeare puts exquisite poetry into the mouths of his lovers, he is not suggesting that we understand them to be great, spontaneous poets. The style of Romeo’s speeches is not exactly Romeo’s style; it is part of Shakespeare’s style, perhaps with some modulations that characterize Romeo’s own idiolectal inclinations. The point is perhaps clearer with Faulkner. Faulkner may change dialectal or other features to index some speech to a particular character or narrator. Nonetheless, the verbal excellence of the speech within that idiom is Faulkner’s style.

Text (II) 155

Plot Our emotional response to narratives is not solely a matter of stories. Of course, it matters who the hero or heroine is, whether we care about or empathize with him or her, whether he or she does suffer or triumph. But those facts alone are not all that matters. No less important is just what we know—or think we know, or imagine—about events and characters, and just when we know or imagine it, just how the news is broken to us, or when it is withheld, what expectations we form, and so on. In short, a great deal of our response to narratives is a function of emplotment. Indeed, even story emotions, such as our empathy with a character or antipathy toward him or her, are in part a function of what we are told and when. Part of my fondness for Jane Austen’s Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice) is the result of my disliking him so much at the outset and coming to see that I had misjudged him. Had I understood him rightly from the start, I suspect that I would not have appreciated him so keenly at the end. My initial dislike is a function of just what information I am given and when I am given it. Thus my response to Darcy is not a matter of simulating a timeless storyworld, all at once. It results, rather, from a process of changing simulations of the storyworld, with all that such changes entail for emotion. Emplotment was one of the first areas of narratology to inspire careful attention to emotion. The classic formulation, articulated by Meir Sternberg and subsequently developed by David Bordwell and others, isolated three key emotions of emplotment: surprise, suspense, and curiosity. As usually explained, suspense involves our attitude toward unknown information about what will happen in the future, whereas curiosity involves our attitude toward what has happened in the past. Thus, in Nevada, I feel suspense over what will happen with Maria and the heroin, but curiosity over Maria’s childhood. Surprise, in contrast, involves the violation of our expectations. The division is useful in practice, as Sternberg, Bordwell, and others demonstrate. However, it is theoretically problematic. It seems haphazard. More technically, it is difficult to see what principles might generate a set of options of this sort. Specifically, surprise seems to be an emotion very different from suspense and curiosity. Moreover, it is not clear that suspense and curiosity are well-articulated. There is an important difference between what has not yet happened and what has already happened. But, using the terms in their ordinary language senses, it seems clear that one can feel suspense over some unrevealed fact about the past (e.g., whether the hero’s evil nemesis survived) and

156  Text (II) curiosity about the future (e.g., about what will happen with some minor character’s marriage). Before discussing this triad of plot emotions further, we need to consider something more basic—interest. The cognitive film theorist Ed Tan has stressed the fundamental importance of interest. Interest is in part a story emotion. But it is crucially a function of emplotment as well. Specifically, Tan argues that recipients of a narrative have a “preferred final situation,” a resolving outcome that they would like to see at the end of the trajectory of events and actions. Our interest in a narrative is fostered by the authorial manipulation of our expectations regarding the story and the relation of those expectations to our preferences. This is obviously a temporal process, and as such it is a function of plot. I want Romeo and Juliet to be united and I want the warring Montagues and Capulets to reconcile. In Tan’s account, my interest in the play is sustained, diminished, or enhanced by the way it manipulates my anticipation of the story trajectory and the way that anticipation produces an emotional response due to its convergence with or divergence from my preferred outcome. Of course, there are many things that engage our interest, and different ways in which something might become interesting. As to the latter, our interest may be direct or empathic. We may find an outcome interesting in itself or interesting because it engages the emotions of a character with whom we empathize: e.g., my interest in Rosaline is contingent on her relation to Romeo. More important for present purposes, we might distinguish events, situations, and persons who are intrinsically interesting from those that have instrumental interest. An event, for example, is intrinsically interesting if it engages one of a recipient’s emotion systems above some threshold to orient and maintain attention. Outcomes of stories often have intrinsic interest. They commonly concern such matters as romantic union or victory in war. A story about whether our hero buys chunky or creamy peanut butter may be interesting for various reasons—for example, in its display of wit. However, it is unlikely to have much in the way of outcome interest. Instrumental interest is emotional engagement due to the relation between the target (e.g., a particular event) and some other event, situation, or person that is intrinsically interesting. For example, the fact that Friar Lawrence’s messenger is detained due to suspicion of plague may have some intrinsic interest. However, in the context of the play, its primary interest is instrumental, for it has significant consequences for our preferred outcome, which is intrinsically interesting. Thus, interest is not simply a matter of preferred final situations. However, in narratives, it is commonly the case that the preferred

Text (II) 157 outcome is one very powerful source of interest, even the predominant source of interest, especially when we are reading for the first time or “reading for the plot.” Or, rather, our preferred final situation is intrinsically interesting, and so is our anticipatory simulation of the actual outcome. Indeed, the relation between the two guides our attention to the unfolding of the events that will lead eventually to the actual outcome. Tan’s stress on interest seems right. Interest is fundamental. Curiosity and suspense presuppose interest. They do not occur without it. Indeed, they develop interest in a broader emotional context. Unfortunately, our ordinary language terms here seem to lack the systematic quality that is desirable in a theoretical vocabulary. Here, too, Tan suggests the way to proceed by his emphasis on preferred outcomes—or, rather, by the importance of preferred and simulated outcomes. But we need to expand beyond preferred outcomes. We might say that a recipient’s attitude of care is aroused by the imagination of a preferred outcome and the concurrent imagination that the actual outcome may be different. Suspense adds to this the simulation of strongly aversive outcomes as actual possibilities. When the hero goes to Alaska, we may want him to find gold; that is, we may care about his success. However, we probably do not experience suspense over this. In contrast, if he does strike gold and we learn of a plot by a rival to kill him for it, we may experience suspense. Curiosity is different from either care or suspense. I take curiosity to involve no preferred final situation. This may be due to the fact that the recipient (e.g., the reader) does not care which possible outcome eventuates. But it could equally be due to the fact that the actual outcome is already known. The latter point is why it might readily seem that curiosity bears on events in the past. It is not so much a matter of the events themselves occurring in the past or in the future as it is a matter of the events bearing on the likely realization of some preferred outcome. Curiosity is perhaps best understood as concerning parts of the story or storyworld that are intrinsically interesting, either directly or empathically, but not instrumentally interesting with respect to the final outcome of the story—thus not a matter of care or suspense. There are variables affecting care, suspense, and curiosity. For example, our degree of care varies with the intensity of our empathic response or our direct emotional engagement with the preferred outcome. Degree of suspense is affected by the likelihood of outcomes as well as their aversive intensity. Here, once again, our response to fiction mirrors our response to life. In both cases, engagement appears to be intensified by uncertainty. As Toates explains, referring to the

158  Text (II) neurochemical dopamine, which mediates seeking behavior (see Panksepp and Biven 88), “neither a 0 per cent nor a 100 per cent estimate of success in obtaining reward is a powerful trigger to dopamine release … Rather, the strong trigger is somewhere between these extremes, with a maximum at 50 per cent, where uncertainty is at its maximum” (Toates 198). Estimates of likelihood define other emotions also. As the possibility of a positive result increases, we may feel hope; as the likelihood of a tragic ending grows, we might become worried or resigned. After the story outcome is revealed, we may experience relief, disappointment, or the feeling of justification that occurs when we get something right—a feeling like satisfaction, with a hint of pride, a feeling for which I believe we have no word in English. These, too, bear on expectation, but prior rather than ongoing expectation. Other responses concern retrospective understanding. Kringelbach and Philips refer to a set of “knowledge emotions,” distinguishing our response to outcomes “that could be understood or coped with” from those that are “not comprehensible and therefore something that could not be coped with” (81). They use the terms “interest” and “confusion,” but the former particularly seems to be an unfortunate choice. Perhaps something like “(emotional) comprehension” and “(emotional) confusion” would do better. In sum, many variables affecting plot emotions bear on outcomes. Some of these relate to engagement. Variables in this category would include degree of intrinsic interest (direct or empathic), degree of preference for some subset of possible outcomes, and degree of aversion for another subset of possible outcomes. These are largely a matter of tacit simulation. Other outcome variables are a matter of likelihood. This involves our tacit estimation of how probable any given outcome might be, with known outcomes marking the limit of such probability. A third category involves comprehending causal trajectories that explain the outcome. There are, of course, also variables affecting plot emotions that do not concern outcomes. For example, the gradient of change from one emotion to another affects the intensity and even the valence of the latter. As noted in Chapter 8, this is in part a matter of story structure. For example, the lovers have to be separated before they can be reunited. But this only sets limits on how steep the gradient of change may be. The swiftness or slowness of the change—whether it is dizzyingly mirthful or a more measured transition from sorrow to relief—is largely a function of emplotment, including the degree to which the tragic elements are elaborated or the happy results muted.

Text (II) 159 Before going on to narration, we might briefly consider one final variable, the temporal scope of simulation. This is a complex topic that I can only touch on here (for a fuller discussion, see my Understanding Indian Movies 180–193). I have been speaking of outcomes as if we are completely ignorant of the ending. However, we often know the outcome. Even first-time readers or audience members for Romeo and Juliet know that the lovers will die and, in consequence, the families will be reconciled. Yet we still feel care over the lovers’ fate and at least something close to suspense when Romeo takes out the poison or Juliet grabs the dagger. Logically, this seems impossible, as we know what is about to happen. But it appears that even when we know outcomes, we estimate the likelihood of possible outcomes and tacitly simulate those possibilities as the story proceeds. In other words, our ongoing, short-term simulations are partially independent of our longer-term knowledge. This may initially appear anomalous. However, a little reflection shows that it is necessary to the adaptive value of counterfactual thinking. Put simply, we would not learn from our mistakes if we did not do something of this sort. If I act in such a way as to produce an undesirable outcome, I go over the sequence of actions that led to that outcome in the hope of realizing how I might have acted differently. If my simulation were rigidly fixed to what actually happened, this would not be possible. Ongoing, short-term simulation that includes counterfactual possibilities is crucial to the way we process causal sequences even when we know the final, factual outcomes. The point, as usual, carries over from life to art.

Narration In some respects, there is less to say about emotion and narration than about emotion and plot. This is not because emotion is irrelevant to narration. Quite the contrary, emotion is central to our response to narrators and focalizers. However, to a great extent, our emotional response to narrators is a function of the degree to which they are personified or personalized, and thus the degree to which we respond to them as characters. More precisely, following Bordwell and others, we may isolate several variables bearing on narrators. One of these variables is personification or personalization, the degree to which the narrator is developed as a character. Personification is not reducible to the traditional distinction between first- and third-person narration. Of course, first-person narrators are usually far more personified than third-person narrators. But there is not an absolute gulf here. Firstperson narrators may involve little character development beyond the

160  Text (II) use of the pronoun “I.” Third-person narrators may manifest perceptual or epistemic point of view: that is, they may present a scene from a particular perspective and their knowledge may be more or less systematically constrained; they may also employ language that conveys judgments, attitudes, preferences, or emotional responses. In other words, they may be implicitly personified, personified without being overtly named or referred to with a pronoun. The narrator of Nevada is often “depersonified,” which is to say, impersonal, confined to reflecting the thoughts of the focalizer, usually Maria or James. However, at times we seem to get a sense of the narrator’s point of view. For example, the seventeenth chapter of the first part begins, “Right after college, Maria tried to be an adult. She stumbled into a job at an insurance company” (69). This does not appear to reflect Maria’s thoughts. In fact, the relation to Maria’s situation at the moment is far from clear. This ties the statements, with their implicit evaluations, more strongly to the narrator. More exactly, we have no reason to believe that Maria is thinking about being or trying to be an adult. Thus the relevance of the idea must be set down to the judgment of the narrator, who clearly perceives Maria as not an adult even now and who seems to be criticizing her for being indecisive and passive. When the narrator construes her getting a job as “stumbl[ing] into” it, he/she suggests that Maria had not made and pursued a decision, but had let herself be guided by happenstance. This in turn hints at a narrator who considers him/herself in some sense superior to Maria, presumably in a way analogous to the ways adults are superior to children. Once the narrator is characterized explicitly in the way I have just done, it may seem that we will respond negatively to him or her, as well we might. However, when that personification is implicit, it almost certainly bears more on our attitude toward Maria than toward the narrator. The narrator construes Maria’s past for us in certain ways. That construal seems likely to encourage us to mimic his or her sense of adult superiority, rather than to resent it as judgmental. In other words, when developed below a certain threshold that triggers awareness, narrator personification may have its most important emotional effects on our response to characters and events through the narrator’s construal of those characters and events, as well as through a sort of tacit mirroring of the narrator’s emotional attitudes. As narrators become more fully and explicitly personified, we are likely to have the usual range of emotional responses to them, just as we have such responses to characters. On the other hand, we care about somewhat different properties of narrators. Characters seek

Text (II) 161 romantic union, pursue glory, try to redeem society, or help or hinder such actions. Narrators, in contrast, tell stories. In both cases we are concerned with what our target, character or narrator, does and does not do. But, in the case of characters, this doing and not doing is a matter of such things as fighting battles, while in the case of narrators, doing and not doing is a matter of telling and not telling. Traditionally, our main concern in the area of telling has been perhaps the most widely discussed topic in narration, reliability, the degree to which the narrator’s account of the story is accurate (see, for example, Phelan). Our main concern in the area of not telling has not been so widely treated, but it has been taken up under the rubric of forthcomingness, the degree to which the narrator gives us story information available to him or her (see Bordwell 60). The key point for our purposes is that reliability and forthcomingness are commonly treated as cognitive or information processing issues, and they of course do involve information processing. However, they are equally emotional issues. The centrality of emotion is straightforward in the case of reliability. Our response to a narrator as reliable is simply a response of trust; our response to a narrator as unreliable is simply a response of distrust. I may or may not have objective grounds for questioning the information conveyed by a narrator. But I will be motivated to discount that information only if I distrust him or her. The point may seem banal, if one assumes that trust is the straightforward result of calculating objective plausibility. Such calculation, explicit or implicit, does of course contribute to a feeling of trust. However, like other emotions, trust and distrust are affected by a wide range of factors, including what other emotion systems are active at the time. For example, research indicates that increasing oxytocin levels increases proneness to trust (see Kringelbach and Philips 116). Since oxytocin is linked with attachment feelings, we might conjecture that the cultivation of attachment feelings in a literary work will foster trust of the narrator. This seems plausible, not only for exaggerated accounts of the excellences of the lovers in a romantic story, but for the excellences of the homeland in a heroic one. The relation of forthcomingness to emotion is less evident. This is due in part to the fact that “unforthcoming” is less evaluative or judgmental than “unreliable,” thus less straightforward in its relation to the emotions of recipients. But, here too, emotional response is crucial. We all recognize that narrators are to some extent unforthcoming, as when they conceal the outcome of events until the end of the narration. A particularly egregious case of unforthcomingness in visual narration may be found when a film presents a murder, but avoids

162  Text (II) showing the face of the murderer—for example, by filming only his or her legs and feet. There are several emotional responses one might have to such a situation. These include being acquiescent and being restive. Some works in effect flaunt their elliptical quality, challenging the reader not to be acquiescent. Indeed, something like restiveness is suggested by Wolfgang Iser’s notion of gaps. Gaps are not merely points where information is missing. They are points where the reader is faced with a palpable absence of information, an absence he or she must work to overcome. Of course, the limitations on a narrator’s forthcomingness are not always so severe and obtrusive. Sometimes they are a simple function of the fact that one cannot say everything all at once. The narrator must tell some things before he or she tells other things. In other words, forthcomingness is in part a matter of limitations on the rate at which information can be communicated. In this case, the recipient’s response is not best characterized as acquiescent or restive, but as patient or impatient. The timing of narrative information is important to the recipient’s response. Arguably, one purpose of literary training is to cultivate patience with narration. If there has been little systematic work on emotion, narrators, and narrational construal, there has been even less on emotion and narratees. Even so, the topic merits a few comments. Narratees too may be more or less personified (i.e., more or less presented as persons, with point of view, discernible prior knowledge, and other traits); as such they may exhibit all the usual character emotions and all the usual emotional relations with other characters, including the narrator. This is not terribly theoretically interesting when it is overt, as when a narrator makes some comment along the lines of “I can see you have received my observations with some skepticism.” Indeed, narratees are often less theoretically interesting to the degree that their presence is obvious, as when there is a frame story in which one character is called on to recount a story to another character. Commonly, the most revealing analyses of narratees come when the narrator makes unobtrusive adjustments for a narratee who is implicit. We find a simple example in the opening of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story.” This story begins with the sentence, “One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof” (105). Clearly, Hemingway knew that the reader of this story would not know the identity of the main character, that of the people taking him to the roof, or that of the building involved. Rather, he has tacitly simulated a situation in which a narrator is addressing a narratee who shares this knowledge. The point bears on emotion as well as information processing, for it may be

Text (II) 163 taken to suggest a certain sort of intimacy between the narrator and the narratee, a shared past with at least a bond of common interests. (Walter Ong made a similar point about another work by Hemingway, though he referred to the reader rather than the narratee.) Indeed, the emotion is arguably more important than the information processing aspect itself. The shared knowledge of the narrator and narratee is in itself little more than a clever literary device. The hint of intimacy, however, may involve more subtle but more consequential effects on our own response to the story. As the last point indicates (and as Ong’s comments suggest), the literary development of a narratee, and of the relation between a narrator and a narratee, may have both cognitive and affective consequences for the implied reader and the real reader of a work. The point applies not only to cases such as that of Hemingway. It holds for love lyrics that appeal directly to the beloved, elegies in which the deceased person is addressed, and other works in which the relation between the narrator and narratee is central. Here, as with many other aspects of affective narratology, there are many potentially fruitful topics that call out for theoretical study. Nevada presents many possibilities for examining narratees. One interesting case comes when the narrator internally focalizes (presents the thoughts of) Maria as she simulates instructing a trans woman on how to present a convincing female face—how to shave adequately, put on make-up, and so forth (see 30–32). The entire scene is affectively complex. On the one hand, the tone of the instruction is apparently upbeat and enthusiastic, a matter of sharing trans knowledge with a sort of apprentice. On the other hand, Maria introduces the entire scenario as a response to the emotional exhaustion of having to go through this process every day because one is trans. I suspect that readers’ emotional responses differ to some extent with whether or not they are trans women. But even many (most?) cisgendered men reading the passage will tacitly simulate themselves into the role of the trans woman narratee. Such simulation may have a number of different effects. The most obvious is some possible fostering of empathy. This returns us to the thematic purposes of Binnie’s novel and our earlier attention to the pedagogy of empathy. When teaching Nevada, one of the exercises that I offered my class was rewriting some section of the work’s narration. Since the rewriting primarily treated focalization, it could be considered an exercise bearing on character. However, it also involves sensitivity to the narrator’s perspective and even to the knowledge and interests of the narratee. Here, too, I did the exercise myself and went over it in class. Specifically, I rewrote a section

164  Text (II) in which Maria is speaking with the trans man, Kieran. I internally focalized Kieran, thus in some degree responding to the arguably twodimensional representation of trans men in the novel. Again, this exercise bears on empathy, and as such it returns us to the concerns of Chapter 7. Asking students to rewrite focalization is in effect a more intensified form of asking them to imagine themselves in the place of a character. The value of such an exercise is empirically supported. In an important book, Jèmeljan Hakemulder showed that readers who were instructed to put themselves in the shoes of the character representing an outgroup to them, were affected more strongly in their beliefs about that outgroup than the group who read the story without such an instruction. (Koopman and Hakemulder 91) This perspective-shifting may be particularly effective when there is a use of both interiority and third-person narration, allowing the commingling of the students’ point of view with that of the character. In other words, we might expect particular success if students were able to take up the narrational practice of free-indirect discourse, in keeping with the prescriptions of Fletcher and Monterosso.

Style and aesthetic pleasure In the introduction to this chapter, I noted that some perceptual aspects of a work that fall under the category of style may be considered a matter of discourse; however, when we understand these features as aspects of style per se, we necessarily to some extent consider the work, not as the verbalization of a narrator, but as an artifact produced by an author. That was a good first approximation, indicating the value of separating out style as a narratological category. However, the situation is more complex than this indicates. Most importantly, style is not simply a matter of verbalization or sensory manifestation. We may define style as a distinctive pattern for some scope and narratological level. By “scope,” I mean some body of targets. A chapter may have a certain style; an entire novel may have a style; an author’s canon may have a style, as may a literary movement or period. In each case, the style is defined by a pattern that does not characterize alternatives in a comparison set. For example, English verse dramas may generally have iambic pentameter as a stylistic feature, distinguishing them from French verse drama or English prose drama. In connection with this, we would most often not characterize the style of Shakespeare’s

Text (II) 165 plays by reference to iambic pentameter alone, since that feature is less distinctive of his work. Finally, by “level,” I mean that it is possible to isolate distinctive patterns not only in language use (thus “verbal style”)—or camerawork, editing, and staging (thus “visual style”) in film—but also in narration or emplotment, story structure, and so on. We may examine stylistic features of Shakespeare’s heroic stories (see Chapter 3 of my How) or his emplotment techniques, such as how he divides scenes (see Chapter 6 of my How). There are many ways in which style may be examined in relation to emotion. Some of these involve “artifact” emotions, as introduced in Chapter 6, following Tan, Plantinga, and others. Prominent among artifact emotions is aesthetic pleasure. Again, stylistic emotion is not confined to aesthetic pleasure. Moreover, aesthetic pleasure is not confined to style. However, the frequent association of the two makes the section on style a suitable place to treat aesthetic feeling. Before examining aesthetic pleasure, however, I should clarify what I have in mind here, and what I do not have in mind. I am speaking of our actual experience of delight in the beauty of a target, whether a face, a landscape, a melody, a poem, or something else. This typically involves such experiences as “immersion” (see Schaeffer and Vultur) or “transportation” (see Green and Donahue), where we are so involved with a target that we become oblivious to everything else. However, aesthetic pleasure is not the same as such transportation. It commonly involves a sort of fascination (a topic explored with much insight by Sibylle Baumbach). However, fascination too is not the same as aesthetic pleasure. Among other things, fascination is much more ambivalent, or even negative, as Baumbach has discussed (see especially her treatment of the sublime, 152–154). It is particularly important to distinguish aesthetic pleasure from some ideas of the aesthetic attitude and aesthetic distance. In discussing aesthetic pleasure with academic audiences, I sometimes find that they understand “aesthetics” in almost the opposite way from how I intend it. Specifically, some aestheticians argue that aesthetic training involves precisely the suppression of feelings. The reasons for this are discussed and criticized expertly by Susan Feagin. She explains that there is a strain of aesthetic thought that maintains the “intricacy, subtlety, and complexity” of art can be understood and appreciated only without feelings (“Affects” 638). Feagin argues, in contrast, that certain sorts of feelings, “far from potentially interfering with apprehending a novel’s subtlety and complexity, are a manifestation of one’s apprehension of it” (647). In any case, the key point here is that I am not referring to emotionless aesthetic distance, but to emotionally engaged enjoyment.

166  Text (II) In this context, I should also remark that I am not referring to our emotional response to art in general. We respond to artworks with many sorts of emotion, all the usual emotions, in fact. One of those emotional responses, sometimes, is aesthetic pleasure. Once again, aesthetic pleasure is not confined to artworks any more than the emotional effects of artworks are confined to aesthetic pleasure. Finally, it is important to distinguish aesthetic response from judgments of “objective” or social beauty. Suppose I say, “Sure, that landscape is beautiful, but I’m afraid I’m not particularly moved by it.” In making this comment, I am indicating that I do not feel aesthetic pleasure, though I recognize the target as the sort of thing that is socially judged to be beautiful. Similarly, suppose a mother looks at her blotchy, ooze-covered newborn and says, “I know she is nothing much to look at, but to me she is the most beautiful thing in the world.” She is acknowledging that the target would not be socially evaluated as beautiful, but simultaneously asserting that she feels aesthetic delight in looking at the child. In this section, we will consider what contributes to aesthetic pleasure. This is of course not unrelated to social beauty. However, the two are not identical, and in the following pages I will not be considering the latter topic. Unsurprisingly, there have been many attempts to understand aesthetic pleasure, though some of them have faltered on the definitional issue. For example, this is arguably an issue with Gabrielle Starr’s treatment of beauty. Starr is a literary critic and theorist who received training in the theory and practice of neuroscience, including such matters as brain scanning. Following this course of study, she undertook some experimental research in collaboration with neuroscientists. In one study, reported in her influential book, test subjects were instructed to evaluate targets based on “how much you find the painting beautiful, compelling, or powerful … rang[ing] from ‘beautiful’ to ‘strange’ or even ‘ugly,’” and including “works you find powerful, pleasing, or profound” (45). The experiment is interesting, but it seems to be trying to evaluate many different sorts of emotional response, perhaps including aesthetic pleasure in my sense, but certainly not confined to aesthetic pleasure. The neurological result was that “components of the default mode network … were engaged” (46). As Stanislas Dehaene explains, one of the resting-state networks, called the default-mode network, turns on whenever we reflect upon our personal situation, retrieve autobiographical memories, or compare our thoughts with those of others. When people lie in the scanner, and we wait until their

Text (II) 167 brain is in this default state before asking them what they were thinking of, they report that they had been mind-wandering into their own thoughts and memories—more so than when they were interrupted at other times. (187–188) Kringelbach and Philips state more concisely that “the default mode network is responsible for introspection and allocating brain resources, while other networks represent sensory processing and action” (227). Thus components of a network treating “mind-wandering” and “allocating brain resources” are, on average, more activated in connection with something in a set of apparently unrelated responses (beautiful, strange, ugly, profound, powerful, and so on) than in the absence of any such response. This does not appear to tell us very much about aesthetic pleasure. Some research has, however, focused more clearly on aesthetic preference. This work suggests, unsurprisingly, that information processing and emotional factors enter into aesthetic pleasure. Specifically, there appear to be two or perhaps three cognitive processes involved, along with two key emotional systems. We may refer to the cognitive processes as prototype approximation, pattern isolation or rule abstraction, and exemplar approximation. In each case, the process needs to be qualified as “non-habitual.” The key emotion systems are endogenous reward and attachment.1 Prototypes are, roughly, average cases of a given type of target (see McLeod, Plunkett, and Rolls 63). For example, the prototypical face is more or less an average face. In keeping with the general principle that prototype approximation fosters aesthetic pleasure, Langlois and Roggman found that test subjects preferred averaged images of faces over the images of real people who composed the average. Note that some widely acknowledged properties of beauty are a direct outcome of the prototyping or averaging process. For example, left-right symmetry results when one averages a large number of faces, though all the real faces contributing to the average are likely to have some left-right asymmetry. Note also that the prototypes at issue are psychological constructs, which individuals implicitly abstract from their own experiences—and which therefore differ somewhat from person to person. Given the psychological and variable nature of prototypes, we would expect agreement on some features of beauty that are likely to characterize any prototype, such as left-right symmetry in faces. However, we would also expect divergence on other aspects of averaging that are more subject to individual variations in experience,

168  Text (II) or cultural variations. Seeing mostly Norwegian faces will produce a different prototype than seeing mostly Igbo faces. Thus we are all likely to find symmetrical faces more beautiful than asymmetrical faces. However, we are not likely to find exactly the same face to be the most beautiful. I should not give the impression, however, that the only case of this sort is faces. In fact, empirical research has shown that prototype approximation predicts preference for both natural objects and artifacts (see Hansen and Topolinski 710 for citations and summary of this work). The point applies to targets ranging from pieces of furniture to colors (Martindale and Moore 670). Some research has also treated prototype approximation in the arts. For example, Repp explains that averaging produces a preferred performance of a sonata. Other research points to non-habitual pattern recognition or rule isolation. Our minds are continually seeking patterns in experience and extracting principles that characterize relations among diverse conditions and events. For example, you will immediately note a pattern and a rule governing that pattern if I write, xxo xxo oxx oxx xxo xxo. You extract a rule and predict that the sequence will continue with oxx oxx. If it continues with xox xox xxo xxo, you will modify the rule, still abstracting a pattern, perhaps still predicting a return to oxx oxx, which will change if one is faced with oox oox—and so on. A number of writers have stressed the importance of pattern isolation for human cognition (see, for example, Edelman 103). Literary theorists have emphasized its bearing on the experience of art. For example, Brian Boyd has argued that art has an evolutionary function in enhancing our capacity to isolate an “unpredictable combination of patterns” (90). On the other hand, Boyd seems to be using “pattern” in a broader sense than implicit rule isolation, including any sort of causal relevance, as suggested by the following example: “patterns, like the tension between Odysseus’ return and the suitors’ attempt to establish themselves in his place” (254). It appears to be the case that our aesthetic pleasure in a target is in part caused by such non-habitual pattern recognition or rule isolation. While research on prototype approximation has focused particularly on visual targets, the research bearing on patterns has principally treated music. As Kringelbach and Philips explain, When listening to music, the human brain appears to be constantly scanning the sound input for predictive patterns … These range from simple acoustic patterns to highly complex hierarchical melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic hierarchical anticipatory

Text (II) 169 patterns which we anticipate being established, confirmed, delayed, or violated. (180) With the violation presumably leading to surprise, reorientation, and new pattern isolation in successful cases. Thus, empirical research points to two forms of information processing as central to aesthetic pleasure. However, if aesthetic pleasure is one sort of thing, we would expect the information processing that underlies it to be one sort of thing as well. How might we explain this apparent duality? In Beauty and Sublimity, I argue that these two processes are both cases of concept formation and thus that there is no contradiction here. By this account, aesthetic response is bound up with categorization. We experience one target as a beautiful face, another as a beautiful bird—or, to allude to the famous Hans Christian Andersen story, one target as an ugly duckling, then, after we change our categorization, the same target as a beautiful swan. It makes evolutionary sense that we would be attracted to good cases of categories and that a feeling of beauty would attract us to, for example, symmetrical mates and make symmetrical pieces of fruit more appealing, or alternatively that a feeling of ugliness would discourage our pursuit of asymmetrical mates or, in some cases, food sources. This resolves our dilemma, as it appears that we have different ways of forming concepts. These include “rule testing” and “prototype extraction” (Murphy and Hoffman 166). Interestingly, Murphy and Hoffman isolate a third process as well, “exemplar learning” (166). If aesthetic response does indeed involve processes of concept formation, this predicts a third type of information processing in aesthetic pleasure—exemplar approximation, similarity to a specific instance. This fits with the tradition, extending back to the origins of Western literary theory, that connects our response to art with our appreciation of mimesis. For example, in his influential 1726 treatise on beauty, Francis Hutcheson asserts that “an exact Imitation shall still be beautiful, tho the Original were intirely void of it” (41). But aesthetic pleasure, like other mental operations, is not solely a matter of information processing. It involves emotion as well. First, a number of researchers have pointed to the unsurprising involvement of the reward system (see Vuust and Kringelbach 266; Koelsch 292– 293; Kawabata and Zeki 1704; and Skov 280). This is, again, the system that governs our seeking behavior (see Chapter 3 of Panksepp and Biven) through its governance of both wanting and liking (on wanting and liking in reward, see Chatterjee, “Neuroaesthetics” 309).

170  Text (II) Any activity that requires our ongoing engagement or that produces enjoyment is likely, perhaps certain, to involve the reward system. We might particularly expect reward system involvement in relation to non-habitual pattern isolation, as the activation of that system is connected with expectation and the frustration of expectation (see Chatterjee, Aesthetic 78). Thus, reward involvement is important. But it is not particularly distinctive of aesthetic pleasure. Attachment, in contrast, appears to be more special to our experience of beauty. There is a great deal of research that points to the involvement of the attachment system in aesthetic enjoyment. But, surprisingly, few writers seem to have drawn the connection explicitly. For example, there is research connecting aesthetic feeling with the caudate nucleus (see Nadal et al. 388; Vartanian and Goel; Montag, Reuter, and Axmacher 511; and Salimpoor et al.). Among other functions, the caudate is associated with “feelings of love” (Arsalidou et al. 47). Moreover, oxytocin increases test subjects’ feelings of facial attractiveness (Heinrichs et al. 524), which is relevant as oxytocin is central to the attachment system (Panksepp and Biven 37, 39). One of the few authors to draw the link here is Stefan Koelsch, who cites “changes within the (anterior) hippocampal formation in response to music” (293) as bearing on “attachment-related (tender positive) emotions” (295; for a more extensive treatment of research on this topic, see the first chapter of Hogan, Beauty). I will conclude with a brief example of aesthetic pleasure from Romeo and Juliet. Note that this is not an example of public beauty. It rather concerns the experience of a particular recipient. The preceding analysis suggests that there will be certain commonalities across aesthetic responses. However, there will be sometimes very significant individual, cultural, historical, or other differences as well. We have already noted this with respect to prototyping. In fact, the same point applies to all the preceding components. The activation of the attachment system may be particularly open to individual variation and thus to divergence in aesthetic response, given our different attachment experiences. However, it is unlikely to be wholly idiosyncratic. For example, we would expect certain themes, such as romantic love or parent-child separation and reunion, to recur in many cases of aesthetic pleasure. If asked to select a scene from Romeo and Juliet to illustrate public beauty, many of us would probably choose Romeo’s speech below Juliet’s window, beginning “But, soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” (II.i.47–70). This is certainly the most famous scene in the play and probably the one most associated with Shakespeare’s

Text (II) 171 excellence in popular imagination. But I find the speech more comical than beautiful. In part, this is a simple matter of habituation. But it is also linked with the details of the speech, for example, its bizarre conceit that Juliet’s eyes are now twinkling in the heavens while her eye sockets have been filled by two stars. But there are lines in the play that I find delightful. Consider, for example, the exchange (I.iv.159–165): ROMEO: SERVINGMAN: ROMEO:

What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand Of yonder knight? I know not, sir. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear: Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

Romeo is expressing his initial fascination with Juliet. In the larger context of the play, I am of course aware that this marks the first stirrings of an attachment relation and a strong feeling of reward dependency through which one’s wanting and liking are governed by the presence, attitudes, and behaviors of another person. As such, through its activation of emotional memories in me, the scene helps to prime my own attachment system empathically, and even connects with my emotional memories of reward dependency. Perhaps surprisingly, I feel Romeo’s delight in Juliet here in a way that I do not feel it in the more famous “balcony scene.” I also begin to isolate complex, non-habitual patterns in the speech. Some of these are a matter of sound. The lines immediately preceding this do not rhyme, so we are not expecting rhymes here. Moreover, if we did have such expectations, they would be for end-rhyme, due to examples earlier in the play and due to more general principles of versification. Here, however, we find the rhyme at the end of Romeo’s second line “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright” echoing not the end of the preceding verse line, “sir,” but the middle of that line, “knight.” The point is complicated by the caesura in that line, which places “knight” before a break within the line that is structurally similar to a break between lines. The next line continues with an endrhyme, “night.” The following lines shift to a different sound for the final words, but these also rhyme: “ear” and “dear.” Moreover, this rhyme picks up on the final word of the line that includes “knight.” Specifically, they present us with a near rhyme of “ear” and “dear” in “sir.” There are other more local repetitions of sounds, thus localized patterns, as well: the alliteration and near alliteration (as with d and t)

172  Text (II) in “doth teach the torches to burn bright”; the assonance of “teach” and “cheek,” and so on. Other patterns that affect me are semantic. For example, the speech makes use of two primary metaphors—more technically, “source domains”—for beauty. The first is wealth, such that greater beauty is greater wealth. The second is illumination, such that greater beauty is more light. Note that the second source domain underlies the opening of the balcony speech, “Juliet is the sun.” However, I am far more affected by the metaphor in these lines. Shakespeare introduces the wealth metaphor in combination with a synecdoche in “enrich the hand.” Then he shifts to the light metaphor, combining it with personification, in “she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” The patterning develops further when the two source domains are combined in the image of a jewel, a source of wealth and a glittering refractor of light. Moreover, Shakespeare integrates both synecdoche and personification through the “cheek” and “Ethiope,” personifying night. The final line takes up the wealth domain alone at first, but then through verbal ambiguity combines it with the attachment concerns of the passage by characterizing Juliet as “too dear,” thus worth too much to purchase but also too beloved. Before concluding, I should say something about the Ethiope in this passage. For some readers, this may appear to be a racist image. I cannot judge Shakespeare’s intention here, but if I did feel it was racist, that would surely inhibit my aesthetic pleasure. In fact, the image of a black-skinned young woman with a glittering jewel is highly exemplary of beauty for me. Moreover, it is closely connected with childhood attachment feelings. Specifically, I grew up in a Catholic family with a deep strain of Marianism, manifest particularly in relation to Our Lady of Częstochowa, the Black Madonna. The image of the Ethiope, at least in my simulation, is therefore connected with an exemplar of beauty, and again with attachment.

Note 1 The following paragraphs summarize part of the first chapter of my Beauty.

Afterword Affect aliens in the land of emotion studies

During the months when I was researching and writing this book, I developed severe tremors in my arms and legs. I went through a year of seeing neurologists, undergoing tests (including a brain scan), and being given various medications that had little or no effect on the tremors, but that often produced debilitating side effects. After being seen by neurologists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, I was ultimately diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder of the dopaminergic system (dopamine being a neurochemical that enables signaling among certain classes of nerve cells, such as those governing movement). After receiving this diagnosis, I began taking dopamine orally, and my condition improved. Some symptoms remained recalcitrant, however. This led to a series of further medications, often with severe side effects but no clear benefits. My experiences during this time had some consequences that are relevant to the present book. First, I was faced with the inexorable force of physical, biological determination, including genetic predisposition, presumably a factor in my case. My tremors and their partial response to some drugs and not others are brute, biological facts. In this sense, the premises of affective science received strong support from this series of events. But at the same time, I was powerfully impacted by the social and institutional aspects of medical science. Foucault is entirely right that medicine is a discipline defined by PowerKnowledge—though I would rather say something like PowerDoctrine, since from my perspective one central problem is that only some parts of medical discourse are aptly considered knowledge. The power relations ranged from local, interpersonal interactions to larger institutional and professional structures. For example, the first neurologist I saw, in Connecticut, seems to have made it a practice never to return telephone calls or emails. Her nurse practitioner would communicate with the patient. However,

174  Afterword even she would only do so indirectly. She required that the patient formulate a single question, report the question to the nurse practitioner’s assistant, who would communicate with the nurse practitioner, then report the nurse practitioner’s answer back to the patient. At a larger, professional level, I saw that doctors in private practice would sometimes begin with one opinion, but then immediately shift when reading that a physician from the Mayo Clinic thought differently. The discourse of neurology is also cruder and more uncertain than we are likely to imagine. Diagnostic categories are disputed and often ill-defined. Treatment regimens sometimes seem like something our hunter–gatherer ancestors would have engaged in: “Here, try chewing on these leaves and see if it does any good.” Various mechanized tests have the very important benefit of removing human bias from the calculation of results. But what those results mean is often far from clear. For example, I learned that a brain scan that is commonly thought to yield unequivocal diagnostic conclusions about Parkinson’s disease does not really do so. Rather, it offers good reason to choose between some prior hypotheses. To make matters worse, medical evaluations, even many involving mechanical tests, are affected by the usual range of human cognitive and affective biases, such as confirmatory bias, our tendency to take equivocal data as confirming prior beliefs. Of course, scientific interpretation is not entirely arbitrary. Neurological discourse today is inseparable from PowerDoctrine. But it does involve truth as well. Chewing on a random plant would not have reined in the tremors in my legs; dopamine replacement did. The point is not that we should dismiss current scientific ideas, including those of affective science. But we need to recognize their limits. As I interact with colleagues in cognitive and affective scientific approaches to literature, I see increasing interest in experimental studies, with particular enthusiasm for brain scans. Experimental research in general, and brain scans in particular, are indisputably valuable, and their value has been underestimated by writers in the humanities, who too often rely on intuitions and equivocal arguments in drawing conclusions about the human mind. But the antidote to this is not in the uncritical acceptance of PowerDoctrine or the apparent implications of empirical research. Of course, everyone working in the field acknowledges that all interpretations of experimental data need to be approached critically. For example, neuroscientists themselves are insistent on the limits of neuroimaging techniques (see, for example, Kringelbach and Philips 269–272). But in practice, skepticism is much more limited. Few people seem to recognize the degree to which apparently objective tests can be recruited for doubtful or even blatantly false conclusions.

Afterword 175 The point is explored well by Plamper (see 206–212). For example, he discusses a famous 2009 reductio ad absurdum where a researcher did a brain scan of a dead salmon and made an argument for certain sorts of neurological response to perceptual stimuli (210–211). The goal of the experiment was to highlight the equivocal nature of such research. In keeping with this, Ronald de Sousa states that “It has been estimated that over half … of published findings based on brain imaging are later invalidated” (85). This returns us to the relation between affective science and affective poststructuralism. In Chapter 2, we considered Sara Ahmed’s concept of affect aliens. Ahmed introduced this as a social category bearing on response to various forms of social coercion and ideology. She connected it with feminism, non-normative sexual preference, and related attitudes and stances. But it seems to me to present an apt model for an emotion critic’s response to the doctrines of both affective science and affective poststructuralism. We should not be too comfortable with any standard ideas about emotion, whether we are dealing with literature or ordinary life. In this very practical respect, then, affective poststructuralism has consequences for affective science. Both bear not only on our abstract reflections, or on our professional critical practices, but on our emotional orientation to the world as well. But their bearing is equivocal, and we need to recognize that. In short, we should all to some extent be affect aliens, at least in our professional lives, including our study of literature and emotion.

Glossary of terms

Action orientation, part of an emotion episode in which one’s body prepares for actional outcomes. Actional outcomes, part of an emotion episode in which one engages in behaviors to alter or sustain the eliciting conditions of the emotion. Activation, see Arousal Aesthetic pleasure, the personal experience of enjoyment due to a feeling of beauty. Affect, a general term for states related to emotion, including moods, attitudes, and some aspects of personality; also sometimes used for bodily states that are understood as emotions only when some cognitive component (e.g., an appraisal process) is added. Affect aliens, Sara Ahmed’s term for people whose emotional responses are at odds with the emotional norms of their society. Affect studies/affect theory, the broad area of research in emotion and related topics, including affective science and what is termed affective poststructuralism in the present volume; sometimes these terms, especially affect theory, are used more narrowly for affective poststructuralism. Affective historicism, the study of historical or cultural variation in aspects of affect (e.g., eliciting conditions) or in ideas about affect. Affective poststructuralism, a term used in this book to refer to the work of writers on emotion and related topics who often draw on affective science but whose intellectual lineage is strongly influenced by poststructuralist thought, including the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Affective science, the mainstream, scientific approach to the study of emotion and related topics that derives from cognitive science, social psychology, and neuroscience.

Glossary of terms 177 Allocentric emotion, an emotion whose eliciting conditions are defined by another person’s actual or hypothetical perspective. Ambassadorial empathy, Suzanne Keen’s term for empathic appeal from one identity group to another. Appraisal, an explicit or implicit evaluation of events or conditions in relation to goals. Appraisal theories, accounts of affect that derive emotion from appraisal. Arousal, in dimensional theories of emotion, the intensity of autonomic excitation in an emotion episode. Attachment style, an enduring disposition toward attachment bonds, prominently including a fundamental feeling of security or insecurity in such bonds. Attentional orientation, the direction of focused perception or other processing (e.g., recollection); emotion episodes commonly involve distinctive attentional orientations. Attitude, an enduring emotional propensity toward some target or class of targets. Authenticity, an author’s real-life experience of the sorts of conditions, events, and/or affects he or she depicts. Basic emotion, an at least partially innate emotion system that is distinct from other such innate systems; in basic emotions theories, emotions are either basic or a combination of basic emotions (e.g., hate might be a combination of anger and disgust). Bounded empathy, Suzanne Keen’s term for an empathic appeal oriented to the author’s own identity group. Broadcast empathy, Suzanne Keen’s term for an empathic appeal that addresses all identity groups. Care, a plot emotion fostered by the imagination of a preferred outcome and the concurrent imagination that the actual outcome may be different. Categorial identity, the delimitation of in-groups and out-groups through labeling, usually with some definition of who is included in which category (“inclusion criteria”) and how to recognize them (“identification criteria”). Catharsis theory of humor, the view that humor is the result of providing some release to stifled emotions or drives. Communicative outcomes, the externally observable manifestations of an emotion (beyond actional outcomes), particularly those that are likely to foster emotional mirroring or emotion contagion. Complementary emotion, an emotional response that is not parallel to a target’s emotion, but a counterpart for that emotion in

178  Glossary of terms some usually antagonistic set of emotions (e.g., Schadenfreude in response to sorrow). Comprehension, a plot emotion involving the recipient’s feeling that he or she understands the causal trajectory that led to a particular emotion-eliciting event. Concretization, Roman Ingarden’s term for a reader’s particularizing imagination of the story or storyworld. Confidence, a plot emotion deriving from the recipient’s simulation of desired story outcomes as certain or nearly certain. Confirmation, a plot emotion resulting from the recipient’s anticipations turning out to be accurate. Confusion, a plot emotion involving the recipient’s feeling that he or she does not understand the causal trajectory that led to a particular emotion-eliciting event. Congruency (emotional), see Mood-congruent processing Construal, a characterization of information about a target, typically as given in a specific verbal statement, including categorization (e.g., “my interlocutor,” “an African American,” and “a tall woman” may all be construals of one person). In relation to plot and verbalization, construal is in part a matter of information selection. It often involves communication of the narrator’s attitudes. Contrastive operation of setting, see Diacritic (Contrastive) Operation of Setting Control, see Dominance Criterial prefocussing, Noël Carroll’s term for the organization of a work (often related to genre) that fosters “emotive focus,” which is to say the emotional orientation of a recipient. Critical period, a developmental period when some cognitive or affective system undergoes initial organization, with systemic consequences that are difficult or impossible to alter later on. Cultural construction, see Social construction Curiosity, a plot emotion perhaps best characterized as involving interest without a simulation of consequences for the preferred final situation (e.g., knowing that the hero acquires enough money to marry the heroine, one may be curious as to whether he does so through inheritance or work). Dhvani, a term from Sanskrit aesthetics referring to the suggestiveness or cloud of publicly available associations for any element of a work (including a word, scene, or event). Diacritic (contrastive) operation of setting, the development of the thematic import or emotional significance of one setting by means of its difference from another setting.

Glossary of terms 179 Dimensional theories, theories of emotion that explain apparently different emotions (e.g., anger and fear) by reference to a limited number of variables, such as valence, dominance, and arousal. Direct interest, emotional engagement that we feel due to the properties of the target (e.g., its beauty) and not due to its relation to other targets or other persons. Disappointment, a plot emotion produced by a recipient’s learning that his or her preferred, simulated outcome did not materialize. Discourse, the presentation of story and storyworld in a narrative; discourse comprises narration, plot, and verbalization or sensory manifestation. Discursive affect aliens, people who are (stereotypically) classed as emotionally alienated. Display rules, the socially determined constraints on emotion expression. Disposition, the more or less enduring features of an organism that interact with current conditions (circumstances and events) to produce an emotion episode. Dominance, in dimensional theories of emotion the degree and kind of control that may be exercised by a subject in an emotion episode. Egocentric emotion, an emotion whose eliciting conditions are defined by one’s own perspective. Eliciting conditions, the causes of an emotion episode, involving dispositions and circumstances or events. Embodiment, the grounding of abstract cognition in the subject’s bodily experience and actions. Emotion, a motivational state arising in an emotion episode. Emotion contagion, the experience of an egocentric emotion elicited by the egocentric emotion of another person, distinguished from empathy. Emotion episode, the occurrence of an emotion, analyzed into a number of components, including eliciting conditions (dispositional and occurrent), actional orientation, actional outcomes, attentional orientation, communicative or expressive outcomes, physiological outcomes, and phenomenological tone. Emotional memories, memories that revive an emotion when activated; emotional memories are themselves implicit, though they are often activated along with associated explicit memories of particular past events. Empathic interest, emotional engagement with a target due to its significance for someone else, including a fictional character.

180  Glossary of terms Empathy, the experience of an allocentric emotion elicited by and parallel with the egocentric emotion of another person. Emplotment, the selection and organization of story elements into a plot. Exemplar, an instance of a category, sometimes a highly prototypical instance; one of the three types of concept, along with prototypes and rules. Experiential affect aliens, people who feel emotional alienation from social norms. Explicit memories, memories of which we are self-consciously aware once they are activated; differentiated from implicit memories. Expressive outcomes, see Communicative Outcomes Expressivism, the view that some works of art should be understood principally as an expression of their creators’ emotions. The strongest form of expressivism would claim that, in successful expression, a recipient’s emotional response is congruent with the emotions of the implied author, which in turn derives from the emotional experiences of the real author. False empathy, an emotional response to a target such that the subject mistakenly believes that he or she is feeling what the target is feeling. Feeling, the phenomenological tone of an emotion. Focalizer, a character who serves to restrict the story and storyworld information conveyed by the narrator. Forthcomingness, the degree to which the narrator supplies or withholds story and storyworld information. Habituation, desensitization to a repeated experience. Hedonic asymmetry, the systematic difference between subjects’ response to pleasurable and unpleasurable emotions or other experiences (e.g., the greater ease with which we habituate to pleasure than to pain). Hedonic tone, the pleasurable or painful quality of an experience, including an emotion. Heuristics, in cognitive science, simple routines used automatically by the mind as a substitute for more elaborate reasoning (e.g., the availability heuristic leads us to assume that something is more common to the extent that we can readily recall instances of it); these routines approximate systematic reasoning in most cases, but also produce biases. Hope, a plot emotion defined by the simulation of one’s preferred outcomes as possible outcomes.

Glossary of terms 181 Implicit memories, memories that are not the object of self-conscious awareness, despite their effects; implicit memories include skills (e.g., how to ride a bicycle) and emotional memories. Implied author, a norm for textual interpretation, understood variously; one way of viewing the implied author is as the receptive intent of the real author, the intent of the author reading as a recipient of the text and judging the text to be right for the experience desired by that author. Implied reader, the reader tacitly anticipated by the implied author, including allowances for real readers’ idiosyncrasies of emotional response and simulative concretization. In-group bias, the tendency to favor in-group members over out-group members and to evaluate them more positively. Incongruity theory of humor, the theory that humor results from incompatibility between elements in its eliciting conditions. Inferred author, the recipient’s simulation of the creator, usually as a norm for interpretation. Initial emotion episode, that part of the emotion episode that concerns the first set of eliciting conditions and their development, prior to the onset of meta-emotion or emotion modulation. Instrumental interest, emotional engagement with a target due to its bearing on another concern (e.g., a minor character’s ability to help or harm the hero). Intensification of emotion, in an explanation of story universals, the process of story formation whereby the outcome emotion (e.g., joy at the lovers’ union) is rendered more forceful by what precedes it (e.g., their separation and near death). Intensity, the degree to which an emotion episode has motivational or experiential force. Interest, a fundamental component of plot emotion; interest is any sort of emotional engagement by a target (it may be intrinsic or instrumental, direct or empathic). Interpersonal stance, a subject’s emotional orientation toward another person or persons in a particular situation. Intrinsic interest, emotional engagement produced by the target itself. Managing ambivalence, the ways a literary work guides complex responses involving more than one emotion. Masking, usually the modulation of a communicative outcome; in Lalita Pandit’s usage, a form of mood repair in which the subject develops a socially acceptable emotion to mask a socially unacceptable emotion, concealing the latter from others and from himself or herself.

182  Glossary of terms Meta-emotion, an emotion elicited by a prior experience of emotion (e.g., shame over anger). Mimetic, James Phelan’s term for an approach to character, setting, or other elements of the narrative as if they were part of the real world; differentiated from synthetic. Mirroring, a neurological process by which an observer’s brain responds to the observed actions of another subject in a way that overlaps with the observer’s brain response when he or she produces parallel actions himself or herself. Mood, a disposition to experience a particular sort of emotion episode; moods are much more enduring than emotion episodes, but much less enduring than personality traits. Mood-congruent processing (emotional congruency), the tendency of an emotion to be self-perpetuating, such that a current emotion biases cognitive and affective processes to selectively activate memories of the same emotional quality, to understand situations in mood consistent ways, and so on. Narration, the communicative axis of discourse, comprising the narrator, narratee, and processes of focalization. Parallel emotion, an empathic or sympathetic response to a target’s emotion (e.g., compassion in response to sorrow); differentiated from complementary emotion. Pattern, a rule-governed regularity across particular targets. Perceptual–associative account of emotion, a theory of emotion that claims the circumstantial elicitors of an emotion episode are a matter of currently experienced perceptions, perceptual memories, or simulations. Personal distress, an egocentric response to the aversive quality of a target’s negative emotion. Personification (personalization), the degree to which a narrator or narratee is given human properties or personhood. Phenomenological tone, the subjective experience of an emotion. Physiological outcomes, the physiological changes (e.g., in heart rate) that occur in an organism as part of an emotion episode. Place attachment, attachment bonding to a location, such as a home. Play theory of humor, the theory that humor is a form of or development out of childhood play. Plot, the part of discourse comprising the selection and organization of story information. Practical identity, a person’s patterned capacities and dispositions, especially insofar as they intermesh with the capacities and dispositions of others in social interactions.

Glossary of terms 183 Preferred final situation, Ed Tan’s phrase for the story resolution envisioned as most desirable by a recipient. Productive intent, the full complex of ideas and associations that led an author to produce some part of a work initially; differentiated from receptive intent. Prototype, a mental structure representing a standard case of a category (e.g., “face”), roughly the product of tacit averaging across one’s experiences of instances of that category; one of the three types of concept, along with rules and exemplars. Public beauty, see Social beauty Rasa, in Sanskrit aesthetics, the usually empathic emotion of recipients of an artwork. Rasadhvani, the fostering of rasa through dhvani. Receptive intent, an author’s evaluative experience of a work as a reader, the basis on which he or she determines that a work has been completed; differentiated from productive intent. Recipient, general term for reader, auditor, audience member, and so forth. Recognitional empathy, empathy based on recognition of parallels between one’s own experiences and those of a target. Relief, a plot emotion in which the recipient responds to the nonoccurrence of an aversive outcome that he or she had simulated as a real possibility. Resignation, a plot emotion in which the recipient no longer imagines positive outcomes as real possibilities. Reward system, the motivation system that governs wanting and liking. Role (character), the definition of a character by the place of his or her behavior in the trajectory of action; differentiated from type. Rule, a generalization that defines necessary and sufficient conditions for a pattern across particular targets (which themselves differ according to the values given to the rule’s variables); one of the three types of concept, along with prototypes and exemplars. Script, an abstract mental structure that represents recurring features of a standardized activity, especially one involving social interaction (such as going to a restaurant). Seeking, actional outcome of the reward system. Sensory manifestation, the perceptual interface between the discourse and the recipient (e.g., the sounds and images of a film). Simulation, the spontaneous or effortful, implicit or self-conscious imagination of hypothetical or counterfactual experiences; a key element in empathy and in literary understanding and response.

184  Glossary of terms Sincerity, congruence between a real author and an implied author. Situated cognition, the view that human mental operation can only be understood as manifest in bodily action and experience (“embodied”) embedded in a social and physical context and distributed across a social network. Situational determination, the production of a behavior or other event by circumstances (e.g., some apparent gender differences result from the different situations in which men and women regularly find themselves). Social beauty, what is generally evaluated as beautiful in a given group; this may or may not be an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure for a given recipient. Social construction, the production of social practices and ideas; this influential idea arguably obscures the differences between deep socialization, shallow socialization, situational determination, and mere false ideology. Socialization, the process of forming practical identities to conform to social norms; may be “deep” and difficult to alter due to critical period development or more “shallow” and malleable due to later development. Somatic markers, Antonio Damasio’s term for the bodily feedback that defines emotional experience. Story, the causal sequence of events suggested by the plot and simulated by authors and readers. Storyworld, the enduring features of the simulated world as suggested by the plot, particularly character and setting. Strategic empathy, Suzanne Keen’s term for an author’s effort to cultivate a reader’s empathy toward thematic ends. Style, a distinctive pattern for some scope (such as a passage, a book, or an author’s canon) and narratological level (such as verbalization, emplotment, or story structure). Sub-appraisal accounts of emotion, theories of emotion that view emotions as resulting, not from appraisals, but from more elementary processes that may be components of appraisal (e.g., visualization or memory activation). Superiority theory of humor, an account of humor, maintaining that a recipient is amused when he or she feels superior to the object of the humor (or scapegoat). Surprise, response to an emotionally significant, unanticipated story event; functions to reorient the recipient’s attention. Suspense, a plot emotion involving the simulation of strongly aversive story outcomes as significant possibilities, but not as inevitable.

Glossary of terms 185 Sympathy, here, the experience of parallel, allocentric emotions defined by a target’s interests, though not necessarily his or her current feelings. Synthetic, James Phelan’s term for an approach to character, setting, or other elements of the narrative as artificial (e.g., linguistic) constructs; differentiated from mimetic. System-based emotion theory, a theory of emotions that posits the existence of distinguishable emotion systems, often in the form of basic emotions. Target, the object of an emotion or intention. Themes, as used in this book, the implications of a literary work for the recipient’s relation to the real world, most often ethical or political. Time-scales of simulation (temporal scope of simulation), the difference between a recipient’s (often implicit and spontaneous) simulation of what is about to happen and his or her longer-term (often selfconscious) simulations, such that one might experience momentto-moment suspense even though one knows that the aversive outcome does not ultimately materialize. Trait affectivity, a disposition to have or not to have a particular emotion. Trust, a narration emotion by which the recipient feels that the narrator has goodwill and/or good judgment; trust motivates accepting a narrator’s account as reliable. Type (character), the definition of a character by a standardized cluster of dispositional or personality features; differentiated from role. Universal, a property or pattern that recurs across unrelated literary traditions with significantly greater frequency than would be predicted by chance. Valence, the positive or negative quality of an emotion. Verbalization, the linguistic manifestation of a discourse.

Further reading

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. An example of affective poststructuralism. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. An example of affective poststructuralism. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. A selection of writers in affective poststructuralism. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. An account of story structure in terms of emotion. Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. An analysis of the contributions literary study can make to affective science. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005. A study of politics and emotion. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. An examination of literary empathy. Kim, Sue. On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative. Austin: U of Texas P, 2013. An examination of an under-discussed emotion. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. An examination of metaphor and emotion. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. A philosophical exploration of emotion, with particular attention to literature. Oatley, Keith. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. A synthesis of work on literature and cognition, including simulation and emotion. Oatley, Keith. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. A book that combines Oatley’s work as a psychologist and a fiction writer.

Further reading 187 Plantinga, Carl. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. A study of film through affective science. Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2005. An examination of emotion in the arts. Smith, Greg. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. A theory of film and emotion. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. A synthesis of ecocriticism and affective science. Zeki, Semir. Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. An exploration of art and emotion by a neuroscientist.

Works cited

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Index

Abhinavagupta 97 action in emotion episodes 45 action outcomes 45, 176 action readiness 45, 176 adaptive learning 114, 115 aesthetic: descriptive, worldoriented literary study 20; literary theory 19; normative, worldoriented literary study 20; norms (Horace) 3; pleasure: 10, 106, 164–72, 176; response 18–19, 165–6 affect: Ahmed on 33–4; aliens 8, 36–8, 72, 175, 176, 179, 180; Charland on 30; Coleman on 30; defined 29, 39, 176; dispositions 41; heuristic 34–5; Frijda and Scherer on 39; Frijda on 29, 31; Laplanche and Pontalis on 30; Massumi on 31; Seigworth and Gregg on 29–30; varieties 39–42; see also emotion episodes; theories of emotion affect studies: author’s path to, 14–16; defined 176; reasons for recent rise of, 13–17; see also affective poststructuralism; affective science affect theory, 7–8, 15, 22; see also affective poststructuralism The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and Seigworth) 26–7 affect-as-information approach 34 affective ecocriticism 137, 152n1 Affective Ecologies (Weik von Mossner) 152n1

affective: empathy 119, 122–3; forecasting 146; genre analysis 77–9; poetics 1–4; ToM (Theory of Mind) 122–3, 124–6; turn 17 affective historicism: affective genre 77–9; defining 9, 62, 176; history of emotions and cultural constructivism 63–6; see also emotion episodes Affective Narratology (Hogan) 10, 146 affective poststructuralism: on “affect” 28–9; argument/analysis 27–8; as component of affect study 12; convergence with affective science 22, 25–6, 31, 32, 38; defining 8, 176; divergence from affective science 19–20, 23, 24, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 38; origins 22–4; political critique 8, 16, 26, 30–1, 33; theorists 26–7; weaknesses 32 affective science: and affect theory 7–8; approaches 24–5; argument/ analysis 28; as component of affect study 12; convergence with affective poststructuralism 22, 25–6, 31, 32, 38; defined 176; divergence from affective poststructuralism 19–20, 23, 24, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 38; on focus on affect 28–9; goals 30; political critique 19, 26, 31; rationale for book’s focus 32–3; theorists 26–7

202 Index affects, 30, 39–42 Ahmed, Sara: affect aliens 8, 36–8, 72, 175; happy families 33–6; poststructuralist orientation 14, 32 Aldama, Frederick 26 alienation effect (Brecht) 3 ambassadorial strategic empathy 129–30, 177 ambivalence 143, 181 Andersen, Hans Christian 169 anxiety fiction 78 appraisal theories: defined 177; mechanisms 56–7; Oatley on 49, 86, 124–5, 126–7; objection to 55; overview 49–50; as personal 31; premise of 54; primary and secondary appraisal in 54; questions about 55–6; and Romeo and Juliet 54, 58–61; and subappraisal theories 58 Arab–Persian, Muslim poetics 2, 3 Aristotle 3, 5, 72, 93, 135 arousal 50, 177 artifact emotions 98–101, 105, 165 attachment: in aesthetic pleasure 170–2; in childhood 60; loss 150; oxytocin in 161; with place 136–9, 148; in romantic love 53, 67; in Romeo and Juliet 52, 60, 149–50, 170–2; styles 65, 177; systems 53, 146, 149, 167, 170 attentional orientation 44 attitudes: defining 40–1, 177; in Romeo and Juliet 40–1; shared 33–4, 36 Austen, Jane 127 authenticity 82, 84–5, 86, 89, 94–5, 177 authors: emotional authenticity 82, 84–5, 94–5; implied 5, 6, 7, 9, 89–90, 92, 154; productive intent 91–2; as readers 89; real 5–6, 7; receptive intent 91–2; see also affective historicism; expressivism Babb, Lawrence 76 Bain, Frederika 72–3 Bargh, John 90 basic emotions theories 49, 53, 177

Baumbach, Sibylle 165 Beauty and Sublimity (Hogan) 169, 170 Berlant, Lauren 102 Berridge, Kent 42 binaries 13, 23–4, 28, 38n3 Binnie, Imogen 9, 11n1; see also Nevada (Binnie) Bloom, Paul 131n1 Bordwell, David 10, 155, 159 bounded empathy 128–30, 177 Boyd, Brian 168 Brecht, Bertolt 3 broadcast strategic empathy 130, 177 Brody, Leslie 49 Bushman, B. J. 38n4 Butler, Judith 130 Buunk, Abraham 57 care (about preferred outcome) 157–8, 177 Carroll, Nöel 106–17, 134–5 Castano, Emanuele 125–6 catharsis theory (humor) 108, 111, 177 character: roles 143, 183; types 145, 185 characters: character analysis 140–3; character emotion examination 144–6; recipient emotion examination 139–40; theorizing 140–1 Characters in Fictional Worlds (Eder, Jannidis, Schneider) 140 Charland, Louis 30 Chinese poetics 2 Clark, Jason 104 Clore, Gerald 147 cognitive: character analysis 140–1; empathy 119, 122–3, 128; literary theory 134–5; science 4, 6, 13, 17, 24–6, 40, 141 Coleman, Felicity 30 Collins, Allan 147 comic amusement 106–10, 111, 112, 114, 116 comprehension 158, 178 concretization 97, 178 confusion 158, 178

Index 203 congruency 39, 178 construal 134, 153, 160, 162, 178 Cowie, Roddy 41–2 criterial prefocusing 134–5, 178 critical discourse analysis; see discourse analysis (Foucault) critical period developments 57, 60, 65–7, 178 Culler, Jonathan 96 Culture of Conformism (Hogan) 152n5 curiosity 155–8, 178 Damasio, Antonio 25, 26, 46, 61n2 Darwin, Charles 27 de Houwer, Jan 55 de Sousa, Ronald 175 deconstruction 13, 23–4, 26, 27, 29, 33, 38n2, 38n3 Deeper than Reason (Robinson) 95n3 Dehaene, Stanislas 56, 166–7 Deleuze, Gilles 24, 26, 27, 32 Derrida, Jacques 15, 22, 23–4, 32 descriptive: literature-oriented approaches (of literary study) 18; world-oriented purposes (of literary study) 20–1 descriptively oriented theories (humor): 107, 113–14; see also incongruity theory (humor); play theory (humor); superiority theory (humor) dhvani 1, 178 Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Test 126 differential emotions theory 27 dimensional theories of emotion 8, 50–2, 179 direct emotions 102 disappointment 158, 179 discourse: analysis (Foucault), 15, 22–3, 26, 27, 32, 38n1, 173; defining, 5, 26, 153–4; narration emotions, 159–64; overview, 132– 3, 153–4; plot emotions, 155–9; style and aesthetic pleasure, 164–72 display rules 47, 179 dominance 50, 179

Eder, Jens, 140–1 eliciting conditions: circumstantial 28, 47, 66–7; dispositional 28, 67, 179; for emotion episodes 42–3; historical variation 67–8; in Romeo and Juliet, 42–3, 68–9 embodiment 46, 179 emotion: allocentric 119, 120, 177; centrality in fiction 1–24; complementary 46, 47, 177; contagion 67, 119–20, 179; defining 42, 179; egocentric 102, 113, 120, 124, 127, 128, 179; Frijda on 29; global, 103, 104, 116–17; intensification 147–50, 181; kind 99–104; knowledge emotions 158; label 43; literary emotion studies 4–7; local, 103, 104, 116–17; masking 48, 181; microemotions 41–2, 104; and narration 159–64; narratology 5–6, 7, 18, 135, 155; parallel 81, 82, 182; perceptual–associative accounts 56–7, 59–60; and plot 155–9; processing theories 54–5; and readers 98–106; regulation 47–8, 71; Robinson on 50, 74; scripts 72, 74, 103; sources 57; sympathetic 102, 110; emotion systems theories 8, 28, 49–50, 53–4, 103, 109; (meta) 47–8, 101, 142, 182; see also appraisal theories; dimensional theories emotion episodes: action in 45; and affective historicism 66–79; attentional orientation in 44, 177; communicative outcomes 46, 66, 70, 177; defined 179; eliciting conditions 42–3, 179; emotion regulation in 47–8, 71; expressive outcomes 46–7; initial 47; phenomenological tone in 45–6; physiological outcomes 25, 42, 45, 46, 56, 64, 66, 68, 182; primary 52–3, 101; prototypes and scripts 72, 103; secondary 53; simulation and emotion elicitation 43–4; targets of, 43 emotional: authenticity 82, 84–5, 86, 89, 94–5; communities 71–2;

204 Index congruency 39–40; memories 57, 59–60, 65–7, 82, 88, 93–4, 97, 144, 171, 179; response 112, 135; emotive cues 104 empathic emotions 102 empathy: and emotional contagion 67, 119–20; and literature: empirical studies 121–8; and literature: theoretical analyses 128–31; defined 180; false 120, 180; overview 118–21; and projection 120, 124; recognitional 130, 131, 183; and sympathy 120 emplotment 153, 180 ethical–political: descriptive, world-oriented literary study 20; literary theory 19; normative; world-oriented literary study 20; response 19–20; training of sensibility 19–20 European poetics 3 exemplar approximation 167, 180 explanatorily oriented theories (humor) 107 expression masking 48 expressive outcomes 46–7, 57, 67 expressivism: authenticity 84–5, 89; and authorship 80–92; defining 9, 81; and interpretation 92–5; defined 180; overview 95; Robinson on 9, 82–3, 86–90, 91; sincerity 9, 84–5, 87, 92; see also implied authors Fabrigar, Leandre 40 Feagin, Susan 165 feeling 45–6, 180 fiction emotions 98–101, 105, 155–8 FID (free indirect discourse) 127 Fine, Cordelia 64–5 Fisher, Helen 70 Fletcher, Angus 127–8, 129 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) 11, 15, 16, 28–9 focalization 154, 159, 160, 163, 164, 180 Forgas, Joseph 152n5 Forster, E. M. 141 forthcomingness (of narrators) 161–2, 180

Foucault, Michel 15, 22–3, 26, 27, 32, 38n1, 173 Foucaultian discourse analysis 22–3 Frijda, Nico 26, 29, 31, 39–40, 42 Frye, Northrop 145 gaps (in narration) 162 Gaut, Berys 102 generalization approach (literatureoriented studies) 18, 21 genres 146–52 Gerrig, Richard 100–1, 140, 142 Gibbs, Anna 27 Gilbert, Daniel 146 global emotions 103, 104, 116–17 glossary of terms 176–85 Goldman, Alvin 120–1 Gonzaga, G. 25 Gopnik, Alison 131n1 Gordon, Richard 26 Grand Theory 12, 13 Greenblatt, Stephen: on authenticity 94–5; on marital love in Shakespeare 80–2; on Shakespeare 84, 92–3; on simulation 92; on the universal 85, 86; on vice character 145–6 Gregg, Melissa 26–7, 29, 33 Grossberg, L. 27 Guattari, Félix 24, 26, 27 habituation 20, 68, 109, 112, 167, 168, 170, 171, 180 Hakemulder, Frank 123–4 Hallissy, Margaret 78 Hamilton, Patrick 26 happiness 8, 33–6, 52 “Happy Objects” (Ahmed) 33 hedonic asymmetry 112, 180 hedonic valence 49, 51–2, 180, 185 Heidbrink, Henriette 153n3 Heidegger, Martin 27 Heider, Karl 48 Hemingway, Ernest 162–3 hermeneutic character analysis 140 heroic tragic-comedy 149 heuristics 26, 34–5, 115, 117n2, 180 Hickok, Gregory 120 history of emotions and cultural constructivism: in affective historicism 63–6; overview 78–9

Index 205 Hogan, Patrick Colm 10, 14–16, 38n1, 38n2, 38n3, 57, 86, 92, 148, 152, 159, 160, 170 Holland, Norman 18 Hope 158, 180 Horace 3, 9, 135 Hucheson, Francis 169 Huckleberry Finn (Twain) 136 humor theories: descriptively oriented 107, 113–14; explanatorily oriented 107; humor functions 114–16; incongruity theory 111–14; overview 106–8; parental attention theory 110–11; play theory 109–11; superiority theory 108–9, 110, 114 humoral view of character 3, 5, 141 Humour (Carroll) 117n1 hydraulic model 24, 30, 33, 38n4 Iacobani, Marco 120–1 identity 34–6, 177, 182 immersion 165 implied authors: defined 181; Hogan on 92; and narrators 154; overview 5–6, 7, 9; Robinson on 9, 89–90 implied readers 5–6, 7, 9, 96–8, 118, 128–30, 132, 181 incongruity theory (humor) 111–14, 181 Indian poetics 1–2 individualization of character 142–3 inferred author 89, 90, 181 in-group: bias 181; in Nevada 128–9; overview 34–5, 36; in Romeo and Juliet 116, 142, 151; Shakespeare’s experience of 92–3; superiority theory and 108, 114 initial emotion episode 47, 181 innate sensitivities 28, 57, 82 interest (in plot) 156–8, 179, 181 instrumental interest 156, 157 Interpersonal Perception Task 124 interpersonal stance 41, 181 Iser, Wolfgang 162 Jannidis, Fotis 140–1 Japanese poetics 2 Jauss, Hans Robert 62–3

Joyce, James 65 Juslin, Patrik 55 Kahneman, Daniel 26, 115 Keen, Suzanne 26, 120, 123, 128, 130 Kidd, David 125–6 Kim, Sue 26 King Lear (Shakespeare) 82, 84, 93–4 knowledge emotions 158 Konstan, David 63, 71 Koopman, Eva 123–4 Kringelbach, Morten 13, 158, 167, 168–9 Kristeva, Julia 25 Kuiken, Don 123–4 Kurtz, Jaime 146 Lacan, Jacques 15, 24, 30 Lakoff, George 26 Language of Psychoanalysis (Laplanche and Pontalis) 30 laughter 107 Lazarus, Richard 54 LeDoux, Joseph 26, 43, 46, 57 Levy, Dore 95n1 Leys, Ruth 25, 30 literary emotion 4–7 The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Liu) 2 literary study: orientations 7; purposes of 17–21; worth of 12– 13; see also affective historicism; expressivism literature: empirical studies 121–8; theoretical analyses 128–31 Liu Hsieh 2 local emotions 103–4, 116–17 logocentrism 23, 27 Luhrmann, Baz 51, 133–4 Mar, Raymond 124–6 Margolin, Uri 140 Marxist ideological critique 3 Massumi, Brian 25, 27, 31, 32, 50 Matsumoto, David, 42, 46–7, 55 Mazzocco, P. M. 122 mediated emotions 102 Meek, Richard 75–7

206 Index melancholy 64, 74, 76–7 meta-emotional process 47–8, 101, 142 Miall, David 123–4 microemotions 41–2, 104 Mills, Sara 38n1 mimetic: approach to character 141–3; responses to narrative 135–6, 182 The Mind and Its Stories (Hogan) 10, 86, 146, 148 mirror neurons 120–1, 182 mirth: in Romeo and Juliet 53, 105; theories of 105–16 modulation of emotion 70–4 Monterosso, John 127–9 mood-congruent processing 39–40, 182 moods: as affect 39–40; defining 104–5, 182; Frijda on 39–40; importance of setting for 133–5; in Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 104–5; writers outside affect 61n1 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) 45 Murasaki, Lady 2, 5 narratees 6, 162–3 narration 7, 159–64, 182 narrative discourse: narration 7, 159–64; plot 6–7, 10, 153–4, 155–159; see also style Narrative Discourse (Hogan) 92 Narrative Fiction (Rimmon-Kenan) 141 narratives 123–5, 135, 146–52 narratology 5–7, 18, 135, 155 narratorial perspective 154 narrators 6, 10, 154, 159–64 Nesse, Ransolph 51, 56 Nevada (Binnie): curiosity, surprise, and suspense in 155; emotional diversity in 75–6; global and local emotions in 116–17; in-group in 128–9; modes of existence in 140; narratees in 163–4; narrator characterization in 160–1; outgroup in 129; plot summary 11n1; setting in 138–9; strategic empathy 128–9; sympathetic response to 102

non-normative: aesthetic response 19; ethical–political response 19 normative: aesthetic response 19; ethical–political response 19; literature-oriented purposes (of literary study) 18–19; worldoriented purposes (of literary study) 20 norms: aesthetic 3; notional 83–4; real 83–4, 85; and socialization 114, 116 notional norms 83–4 Nussbaum, Martha 49, 87 Oatley, Keith: on appraisal theories 49, 86, 124–5, 126–7; on emotion 4, 31; on fiction 44; on literature and empathy 121; on reading fiction 121–2, 124–6; on scenes 134–5 out-group: categorical identification 34–6; in Nevada 129; in Romeo and Juliet 74, 116, 151; superiority theory and 114 The Oxford Companion to Emotion and the Affective Sciences 27 Pandit, Lalita 48, 143 Panksepp, Jaak 26, 136–7 parental attention theory (humor) 110–11 Parnell, Charles Stewart 65 particularist approach: literatureoriented studies 18–19, 20–1; world-oriented studies 20–1 Paster, Gail 3, 73–4, 75 pattern isolation 167-72, 182 perceptual–associative accounts of emotion 56–7, 59–60, 182 personal distress 120, 182 personification (personalization) of narrators 159–61, 182 Peterson, Jordan 125 Petty, Richard 40 Phelan, James 135–6, 141 phenomenological tone 45–6, 182 Phillips, Helen 13, 158, 167, 168–9 Philosophical Approaches (Hogan) 38n1, 38n2, 38n3 Pinker, Steven 70

Index 207 place attachment 136–9, 148, 182 Plamper, Jan 63, 71, 74, 175 Plantinga, Carl 99, 100–3 Plato 3, 72 play theory (humor) 109–11, 182 plot 6–7, 10, 153–4, 155–9, 182 plot emotions 155–9 political analysis/critique: in affective poststructuralism 8, 16, 26, 30–1, 33; in affective science 19, 26, 31; ethical–political response 19–20; political analysis 26, 31; political responses 3; see also empathy Pontalis, J.-B. 30 preferred final situation 156-7, 183 Prentice, Deborah 100–1 primary emotions 52–3, 101 Prinz, Jesse 61n3 productive intent (of artists) 91–2, 183 projection 120, 124 Protevi, John 29 prototype approximations 167–9 prototypes 103, 146–7, 183 psychoanalysis 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 140–1 Rabinowitz, Peter 135–6 rahmah 2 rasadhvani 1, 183 rasas 1, 5, 40, 134, 183 Rawnsley, Ciara 143 readers: authors as 89; emotions 98–106; empathy 118–21; implied 5–6, 7, 9, 96–8, 118, 128–30, 132; literature and empathy: empirical studies 121–8; mirth 105–16; real 5–6, 7, 121–8 readership 62–3 Reading the Mind in the Eyes test 124–6 real: authors 5–7; norms 83–4; readers 5–7 receptive intent (of artists) 91–2, 183 recipient response 83–4 reliability (of narrators) 161 relief 158, 183 Renaissance 3, 63, 73-8, 133, 141 resignation 158, 183 revenge stories 150–1

reward system 169–70, 183 rhetorical narratology 135 Ricoeur, Paul 17 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 141 Robinson, Jenefer: on artistic expression 86; on cognitive appraisal theory 55; Deeper than Reason 95n3; on emotion 50, 74; on expressivism 9, 82–3, 86–90, 91; on implied authors 9, 89–90; on sincerity 84 Roggman, L. 167 Romantic expressivism 82, 86–9, 95 romantic love 21, 53, 59, 67, 68, 80, 84, 87–8 Romantic period 2–3, 5 romantic tragi-comedy 149–50 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare): action readiness in 45, 46; aesthetic delight in 106; appraisal account of 54, 58–61; artifact emotion response to 98; attachment in 52, 60, 149–50, 170–2; attitudes in 40–1; author finding aesthetic pleasure in 170–2; constraints in 69–70; contradictory emotions in 53–4; dimensional view of 51–2; eliciting conditions in 42–3, 68–9; emotion masking in 48; emotion regulation in 47–8; emotional scripts 72–3; fiction emotion response to 98; individualization of character in 142–3; in-group in 116, 142, 151; interpersonal stance in 41; as inverse of anxiety fiction 78; melancholy in 76–7; meta-emotional process in 48, 101–2; mirth in 41, 53, 105; modulation of emotion 70–1, 73; moods in 104–5; out-groups in 74, 116, 151; perceptual–associative approach 59–60; phenomenological tone in, 46; public beauty in, 170–1; rasa of mirth 41; Renaissance theories of emotion 74; as revenge story 150–1; as sacrifice story 151–2; secondary appraisal theory applied to 59; setting in 133–4;

208 Index simulation in 44, 59–60, 68–70, 73, 87, 92–4; spontaneous trait inferences in 140; subappraisal account of 54, 58–60; target of emotions in 43; as tragi-comedy 149–50; trait affectivity in 41; using Carroll’s analyses 115–16 Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann) 51 rule abstraction, 146, 167-9, 183 sabi 2, 5 sacrifice genre 149, 151–2 sahr.daya 96–7 salience 153 Sanskrit narrative theorists 5 Scarry, Elaine 44, 132 Scherer, Klaus 39, 42, 54, 55 Schiller, Friedrich 2–3, 5 Schneider, Ralf 140–1, 141–2 scripts (in emotion episode) 72, 74, 103, 183 seeking 149, 158, 169, 183 Seigworth, Gregory 26–7, 29, 33 self-criticism 129–30 sensory manifestation (verbalization) 6, 153, 154, 164, 183 September 11, 2001 65–6 setting: contrastive operation of 136–7, 178; ecocritical treatment of 137–8; fostering emotions 134–6; in Nevada 138–9; place attachment 136–7; variety in Romeo and Juliet 133–4 Shakespeare, William 80–2, 84, 85, 92–4, 145–6; see also Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) shallow socialization 65 short-term simulation 159 side participation 100–1 Sidney, Philip 3, 4 simulation: authorial 85–6, 89–95, 97; defining 6, 43–4, 183; in emotion episodes 43–4; in fiction 88; Greenblatt on 92; with implied readers 97; modulation 69–70; in Romeo and Juliet 44, 59–60, 68–70, 73, 87, 92–4; simulation emotions 98–101, 105, 155–8; sources for Shakespeare 92–4

simulation emotions 98–101, 105, 155–8 sincerity 9, 84–5, 87, 92, 184 situated cognition theory 17, 184 situational identification 130 Smith, Daniel 29 Smith, Greg 103–5 social beauty 166, 184 social construction 64–6, 184 socialization: as function of humor 114–15, 116; defined 184; types 64–6 somatic markers 46, 184 spleen 74, 76, 77, 79n spontaneous trait inferences 140, 142 Starr, Gabrielle 166–7 Sternberg, Meir 10, 155 stories: categories 146–9; crosscultural genres 149–52; defining 10, 132–3, 184; structures 146 storyworlds: character 139–46; defining 5–6, 10, 133, 184; setting 133–9 strategic empathy 128–30, 184 structuralist and semiotic character analysis 140–1 Stubbes, Philip 69 style: and aesthetic pleasure 10, 164–72; artifact emotions 99, 165; authorial 154; defining 164–5, 184 Stymeist, David 77–8 subappraisal theories: and appraisal theories 58, 61n4; defined, 184; overview 49–50; perceptual– associative accounts of emotion 56–7; in Romeo and Juliet 54, 58–60 sub-threshold emotion activations (primings) 104 Sullivan, Erin 75–7 superiority theory (humor) 108–9, 110, 114, 184 surprise 10, 155, 169, 184 suspense 155–8, 184 sympathetic emotions 102, 110, 185 synthetic: approach to character 141–2; responses to narrative 135–6, 185

Index 209 systems approach to emotion 52–3, 185

Tversky, Amos 26, 115 Twain, Mark 136

Tale of Genji (Murasaki) 2 Tan, Ed 10, 98, 99, 100, 101, 156–7 taqwā 2 texts: characters 136–46 139–46; events and stories 146–52; narration 159–64; plot 155–9; setting 132–9; style and aesthetic pleasure 10, 164–72 thematic responses to narrative 135 theories of emotion: basic emotions theories 49, 53; dimensional theories 8, 50–2; overview 48–9; Renaissance 74–5; see also appraisal theories; subappraisal theories Theory of Mind 119, 124–5, 128, 139–40 time-scales 159, 185 Toates, Frederick 38n4, 43, 51, 157–8 Tomkins, Silvan 27, 52–3 trait affectivity 41, 185 trait inference 140, 142 transgender 11n1; see also Nevada (Binnie) transportation (in experience of delight) 165 trust 7, 10, 161, 185

Understanding Indian Movies (Hogan) 159 Understanding Nationalism (Hogan) 152 unhappy queers 36–7 universals 23, 27, 63, 66, 73, 85, 86, 185 verbalization (sensory manifestation) 6, 153, 154, 164, 185 “A Very Short Story” (Hemingway) 162–3 Warhol, Robyn 137–8 Wegener, Duane 40, 104 Wehrs, Donald 25 Weik von Mossner, Alexa 152n1 Wells, Stanley 77 Western poetics 2–4 What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Hogan) 57, 152 Will in the World (Greenblatt) 80–2 Woolf, Virginia, 45 Wordsworth, William, 81 yūgen 2 Zeffirelli, Franco 105, 133–4

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