Search all library resources

Le jeu des émotions dans la littérature française médiévale : du beau aux faux semblant

"Dans la société du spectacle qu'est celle du Moyen Âge, l'émotion se veut révélatrice - son apparence surtout. Comprise à la croisée d'exigences morales fortes, elle oscille entre impératifs de contrôle et de sincérité, selon toute une palette de manipulations à l'appréciation variable dans les œuvres narratives. Le jeu des émotions se conçoit ainsi au cœur d'une dialectique complexe entre éloge, voire recommandation formelle, et blâme explicite des pratiques trompeuses qu'il peut induire, non sans nuances et inversions au gré de son histoire dans la littérature française médiévale. Mettre en lumière les enjeux variés de ce jeu permet de souligner toute la richesse de la codification et de la mise en scène émotionnelle au Moyen Âge."--Page 4 of cover.

Paradoxes of emotion and fiction

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own. First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are irrational in emoting toward fiction, or that we do not emote toward fiction but rather toward factual counterparts, or that we do not have real but only quasi-emotion toward fiction, generated by our playing games of make-believe. All of these proposed solutions are critically reviewed. Finding these answers unsatisfactory, Yanal offers an alternative, providing a new version of what has been dubbed "thought theory." On this theory, mere thoughts not believed true are seen as the functional equivalent of belief at least insofar as stimulating emotion is concerned. The emoter's disbelief in the actuality of components of the thoughts must be rendered relatively inactive. Such emotion is real and typically has the character of being richly generated yet unconsummated. The book extends this theory also to resolving other paradoxes arising from emotional response to fiction: how we feel suspense over what comes next in a story even when we are re-reading it for a second or third time; and how we take pleasure in narratives, such as tragedy, that excite unpleasant emotions such as fear, pity, or horror

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

The emotions of the Ancient Greeks : studies in Aristotle and classical literature

"It is generally assumed that whatever else has changed about the human condition since the dawn of civilization, basic human emotions - love, fear, anger, envy, shame - have remained constant. David Konstan, however, argues that the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and that recognizing these differences is important to understanding ancient Greek literature and culture."--Jacket

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection