Being Moved: Motion and Emotion in Classical Antiquity and Today

2021 ◽  
pp. 175407392110400
Author(s):  
David Konstan
Keyword(s):  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Cognitive Studies ◽  
Educational Theories ◽  
Specific Emotion ◽  
Being Moved

Efforts to identify in the expression “being moved” a new emotion have found a hospitable environment in the recent turn to the body in emotion and cognitive studies, exemplified herein affect theory, with a particular focus on the effects of music. Although classical Greek and Latin had comparable expressions, however, they did not single out a specific emotion. Given that music played an important role in ancient educational theories, and was imagined as having arousing powerful reactions, this might seem a curious absence. The reason, at least in part, maybe the strong cognitive conception of emotions characteristic of classical theories. But this should not discourage the search for emotions that are not included in the ancient canons.

Observation of the presence of crypsis in white mullet Mugil curema (Pisces: Mugilidae) juveniles under artificial rearing conditions

2018 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-227
Author(s):  
Ana L. Ibáñez ◽  
Diana Y. Montero
Keyword(s):  
Laboratory Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Artificial Rearing ◽  
Pigmentation Change ◽  
White Spots ◽  
Dorsal Axis ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Dorsal Area ◽  
Being Moved ◽  
One Way Anova

This study documents the presence of crypsis in Mugil curema juveniles under laboratory culture. Initially, the juveniles were located in one brown tank (BT1), later almost half of the individuals were placed in a white tank (WT) where they showed a pigmentation change to white. After being moved to another brown tank (BT2), the juveniles changed to their brown original colour, but kept a few small white spots on the dorsal axis of the body. The ventral head melanophore pattern also changed in the white specimens. Temperature (°C), oxygen (mg l−1) and Illuminance light (Lux m−2), total length (mm) and total weight (g) were determined by tank. Chromaticity was measured in L*(relative luminance) a*(measurement relating to the redness or greenness of the light) b*(measurement relating to the yellowness or blueness of the light) coordinates where all three values are required to completely describe an object’s colour. One-way ANOVA showed no differences for temperature, oxygen and illuminance light among tanks. Length and weight were similar for BT1 and WT but both were different from BT2. The white juveniles depicted similar L* as the WT background as well as the dorsal area of the brown pigmentation and converted juveniles to the brown tanks BT1 and BT2, respectively. Therefore, the fish's body relative luminance matches the background. To our knowledge this behaviour has not been reported before for any fish mullet either cultured or living in the wild.

The Body Breached: Post-Soviet Masculinity on Screen

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Goscilo
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
Material Values

Whereas the utopian male body of the Soviet Imaginary hyperbolized and recast in steel or bronze the anatomical ideals of classical antiquity (Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘closed body’), post-Soviet cinema typically has featured a male corporeality resembling the open body of apertures and protruberances posited by Bakhtin, but as degraded, marred, and vulnerable (Kenneth Clark) rather than celebratory or regenerative. Thus the indomitable heroes of hypertrophied bulk, brawn, and beauty in Stalinist films such as Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), Mikhail Kalatozov’s Valerii Chkalov (1941), and Mikheil Chiaureli’s Fall of Berlin (1949) have been superseded by the dramatically violated and traumatized physiques of protagonists in recent films confronting war—Aleksandr Nevzorov’s Purgatory (1998 ), Valerii Todorovskii’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein (2004), Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)—and those reassessing the Stalinist era: Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, the Car (1998) and Pavel Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle (1994). Indeed, the latter explicitly deconstructs the forcible transformation of Soviet citizenry into fantastic icons of Stakhanovite virility and its tragic consequences. Similarly, post-Soviet onscreen crime devastates the male body, and nowhere more vividly than in Filipp Iankovskii’s Lermontov-indebted Sword Bearer (2006), which violently imprints all contemporary experience, most of it lethal, on the human form in a world ruled by material values and devoid of communal ideals.

Touching, Feeling, and Healing

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-232
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
The Body ◽  
The People ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Being Moved

This chapter considers touch in empire: it asks us to imagine how the body would feel being moved to a completely new environment. Hapticity, the chapter argues, is both the pauper and king of the senses. It is generally relegated to the realm of the lower senses, beneath even smell and taste. Conversely, touch can also be seen as the most powerful of the senses. It was of great importance in medieval Europe, for example. The metaphors used to describe empire were frequently haptic. The chapter also looks at how the Britons and Americans in India and the Philippines wanted to change the people they encountered. Health was a great motivator in this desire.

Coda: Affect after the Affektenlehre

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-142
Author(s):  
Roger Mathew Grant
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Historical Investigation

This concluding chapter places contemporary affect theory in conversation with the historical investigation outlined in the body of the book. It finds within recent affect theory a certain musicality and a tendency to rehearse dynamics that once played out within historical music theory. This final chapter closes with a call to restore diachronicity and movement to affect theory: to think affect historically, and to therefore pay close attention to the movements between the objects and subjects that have generated it.

Animalizing the Slave: the Truth of Fiction

2000 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 110-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Wild Animal ◽  
The Body ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
The Way

In his discussion of natural slavery in the first book of thePolitics(1254a17–1254b39), Aristotle notoriously assimilates human slaves to non-human animals. Natural slaves, Aristotle maintains (1254b16–20), are those who differ from others in the way that the body differs from the soul, or in the way that an animal differs from a human being; and into this category fall ‘all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service’. The point is made more explicit in the argument (1254b20–4) that the capacity to be owned as property and the inability fully to participate in reason are defining characteristics of the natural slave: ‘Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used; both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs’ (1254b24–6). Slaves and animals are not actually equated in Aristotle's views, but the inclination of the slave-owner in classical antiquity, or at least a representative of the slave-owning classes, to associate the slave with the animal is made evident enough. It appears again in Aristotle's later statement (1256b22–6) that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal.

‘Body part’ terms and emotion in Japanese

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Appraisal ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Specific Emotion ◽  
Film Scripts ◽  
Magazine Articles

This paper examines the use and meaning of the body-part terms or quasi-body part terms associated with Japanese emotions. The terms analyzed are kokoro, mune, hara, ki, and mushi. In Japanese kokoro is regarded as the seat of emotions. Mune (roughly, ‘chest’) is the place where Japanese believe kokoro is located. Hara (roughly, ‘belly’) can be used to refer to the seat of ‘thinking’, for example in expression of anger-like feelings which entail a prior cognitive appraisal. The term ki (roughly, ‘breath’) is also used for expressions dealing with emotions, temperament, and behaviour; among these, ki is mostly frequently used for referring to mental activity. Mushi — literally, a ‘worm’ which exists in the hara ‘belly’ — is also used for referring to specific emotion expressions.The tool for semantic analysis employed in this paper is the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” method developed by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues. This metalanguage enables us to explicate concepts by means of simple words and grammar (easily translated across languages), and clarifies the similarities and dissimilarities between the components involved in semantically similar terms. The data used for analysis are from various sources; published literature both in Japanese and English, newspaper/magazine articles, film scripts, comic books, advertisements, dictionaries, and popular songs.

Feminism, Freedom and the Hierarchy of Happiness in the Psychological Novels of May Sinclair

May Sinclair ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Truran
Keyword(s):  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Physical Constraints ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
The Social ◽  
May Sinclair ◽  
Psychological Novels ◽  
Three Sisters

May Sinclair, in her psychological novels The Three Sisters (1915), Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), and The Life and Death of Harriet Frean (1919-1921), develops a concept of happiness which critiques the social, psychological, and physical constraints that are placed upon women due to their emotional labour. For Sinclair, some forms of happiness are better than others, creating a hierarchy of happiness across her work. Drawing on contemporary affect theory, this chapter offers an analysis of Sinclair’s complicated and deeply ambivalent representation of the feeling of happiness. The concept of happiness in Sinclair’s writing is protean. Certain forms of happiness must be resisted; for example the infantilizing contentment of Harriet Frean or the manipulative selfishness of Mary Cartaret. Still other forms should be actively pursued, for example Mary Olivier’s ecstatic and rapturous relationship with nature. Happiness can also become parasitic on suffering. Sinclair seems to be suggesting in both Mary Olivier and The Three Sisters that self-sacrifice, even self-abnegation, is the route to the “perfect” happiness. Affect can be dangerous in Sinclair’s work. To experience affect is to be affected and therefore the safest happiness is ecstatic: to be outside of the self, to be beyond the body.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document