scholarly journals What, if Anything, Can the History of Emotions Learn from the Neurosciences?

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-105
Author(s):  
Tuomas Tepora
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Temporal Variance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Exclusive Or

The last decade has seen a wave of scholarship on both the history of emotions and the affective and social neurosciences. Both disciplines promote the view that emotions serve partly cognitive and goal-driven functions and are thus susceptible to change. Differences are, however, marked in understanding the nature of the change in question. Is it rooted in social constructivism or neuroplasticity? Are these two paradigms mutually exclusive or compatible? Is it even possible or intellectually sound to utilize ‘laboratory-produced’ and isolated data in historical studies? Nevertheless, in light of recent research on the connections between the history of emotions and the neurosciences the article suggests that the interplay between the historical and brain-scientific knowledge may be more fruitful than has previously been understood. Thus far the implications of the critical and social brain sciences for the history of emotions remain to be worked out. This article proposes an intellectual move from linguistically defined constructivism towards a more corporeal understanding of emotions with a constructivist element. This leads us theoretically towards an understanding of emotions as biocultural, historically changing experiences and intellectual concepts, which, however, possess certain transcultural continuities. The article highlights the intrinsic and dynamic relationship between pan-human characteristics and cultural, normative and temporal variance in emotions. However, the article explores the methodological difficulties and dangers of applying specific brain-scientific data to historical study. The difficulty arises mainly from the academic distance between the history of emotions and the neurosciences.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Kathryn D. Temple
Keyword(s):  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
To Come ◽  
Law And Humanities

This chapter establishes Blackstone's prominence, discusses his influence on Enlightenment thought about law and justice, and reveals his investment in legal emotions as related to harmonic justice. In a reading of his early poem “The Lawyer's Farewel,” it introduces Blackstone's poetics and illustrates methods of both close and surface reading common to literary analysis. The chapter argues that although Blackstone has been the subject of historical study, both Law and Humanities and history of emotions approaches can further illuminate Blackstone's method and impact. The chapter argues for a curatorial approach to Blackstone's work that takes into account his exercise of affective aesthetics and its impact on the history of emotions in law. It closes with a summary of the chapters to come and an argument in favor of foregrounding aesthetics and emotion in legal studies.

scholarly journals Beyond universalism/social constructivism debate in the history of emotions: The case of acedia

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Radenovic
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Desert Fathers ◽  
Biology I ◽  
History Of ◽  
Font Color ◽  
The Way

Peter Toohey (2011) argues that the feeling of acedia, initially described by the Desert Fathers, is a romanticized version of the simple boredom felt by ordinary people. For Toohey, acedia is not real, but manufactured, i.e. a socially constructed emotion, unlike regular boredom which is universally felt. This distinction indicates that Toohey sides with universalist approach to emotions, which helps him avoid relativism of social constructivism in the history of emotions. However, by claiming that acedia is manufactured emotion Toohey is in danger to negate the reality of an emotional experience that many individuals seemed to have had. The goal of this paper is to outline the way we can overcome the shortcomings of Toohey?s approach to acedia. For this purpose, I argue, along with Griffiths (1997), that all our emotions have their roots in both culture and biology. I also argue that a job of a historian of emotions is to engage in the phenomenology of emotions of our predecessors. <br><br><font color="red"><b> This article has been corrected. Link to the correction <u><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/THEO2003169E">10.2298/THEO2003169E</a><u></b></font>

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

For 700 years, Geoffrey Chaucer has spoken to scholars and amateurs alike. How does his work speak to us in the twenty-first century? This volume provides a unique vantage point for responding to this question, furnished by the pioneering scholar of medieval literary studies, Stephanie Trigg: the symptomatic long history. While Trigg's signature methodological framework acts as a springboard for the vibrant conversation that characterises this collection, each chapter offers an inspiring extension of her scholarly insights. The varied perspectives of the outstanding contributors attest to the vibrancy and the advancement of debates in Chaucer studies: thus, formerly rigid demarcations surrounding medieval literary studies, particularly those concerned with Chaucer, yield in these essays to a fluid interplay between Chaucer within his medieval context; medievalism and ‘reception’; the rigours of scholarly research and the recognition of amateur engagement with the past; the significance of the history of emotions; and the relationship of textuality with subjectivity according to their social and ecological context. Each chapter produces a distinctive and often startling interpretation of Chaucer that broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the medieval past and its ongoing re-evaluation. The inventive strategies and methodologies employed in this volume by leading thinkers in medieval literary criticism will stimulate exciting and timely insights for researchers and students of Chaucer, medievalism, medieval studies, and the history of emotions, especially those interested in the relationship between medieval literature, the intervening centuries and contemporary cultural change.

scholarly journals THE METAHISTORY OF EMOTIONS: INBORN PROGRAMS AND/OR CULTURAL MODELS: A Review of JAN PLAMPER, ISTORIYA EMOTSIY [THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS], transl. from English by K. Levinson. Moscow: NLO, 2018, 568 pp.

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (47) ◽  
pp. 183-195
Author(s):  
Alexander Kozintsev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Jan Plamper’s book addresses not so much the history of emotions themselves as their metahistory — the elaboration of the principal approaches to their study. The universalist paradigm, proclaimed by psychologists of the Paul Ekman school, is opposed by social constructivism, advocated by most historians and anthropologists. Plamper’s position is closer to the latter view, yet he cautions the reader against the overstatement of differences between the emotional worlds of people of various cultures and epochs, typical of radical social constructivists. In the reviewer’s opinion, the most promising approach is to combine the psychological constructivism of the Lisa Feldman Barrett school with the linguistic semantics elaborated by Anna Wierzbicka. Plamper, however, regards any manifestations of universalism, either in the form of core affects in the former case, or in the form of semantic universals in the latter, as either unacceptable or uninteresting. The controversy is to some extent terminological: if the definition of emotion includes its object, as Plamper believes, then emotions are infinitely numerous; if not, they are few.

scholarly journals The Study of Emotions as an Area of Interdisciplinary Cooperation: The History and Sociology of Emotions in the Search for the Explanation of “Emotional Turn” (On the Russian Translation of the Jan Plamper’s The History of Emotions)

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-378
Author(s):  
Olga Simonova
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Interdisciplinary Cooperation ◽  
Synthetic Approach ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Sociology Of Emotions ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Emotional Culture ◽  
History Of

A review of Y. Plamper’s book The History of Emotions could hardly reflect its content of the process of the emergence of the history of the discipline of emotions, and the rich variety of problems and themes in the field of emotion research. Therefore, the topic of this article concerns the meaning of this monograph for the sociological study of emotions. We tried to highlight the points of the intersection of the history and the sociology of emotions, including the sociological explanation of the so-called “emotional turn” in social sciences and humanities and in everyday life of contemporary society. The main theoretical and methodological opposition — social constructivism versus universalism/naturalism — pervades all sciences researching emotions today, and a researcher’s destiny depends on the choice within the framework of this opposition. Plamper’s book allows the making of that choice, while inciting researchers to a synthetic approach. The book helps to refine and enrich the sociological study of emotions on the basis of factual evidence and new terminology. One of the most important tasks of both disciplines is the explanation of the changes of the emotional culture of modern societies, which, according to the author of the article, involves an “explosion” of interest in emotions in theory, research, and everyday life. Perhaps a new “sentimental age” has begun as an unintended consequence of the rationalization of all spheres of society. The combination of a rational attitude to emotions and, at the same time, the special attention to feelings, the explosions of collective emotions, and the persistent searching for authentic feelings are features of the emotional culture of our time.

scholarly journals Erratum

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-169
Author(s):  
E Editorial
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Font Color

u tekstu Ljiljane Radenovic, ?Beyond Universalism/Social Constructivism Debate in the History of Emotions: The Case of Acedia?, Theoria 4 (2019), str. 5-15 (https://doi.org/10.2298/THEO1904005R), nedostaje sledeca fusnota: Ovaj clanak nastao je u okviru projekta ?Dinamicki sistemi u prirodi i drustvu: filozofski i empirijski aspekti? (evidencioni broj 179041), koji finansira Ministarstvo prosvete, nauke i tehnoloskog razvoja Republike Srbije. <br><br><font color="red"><b> Link to the corrected article <u><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/THEO1904005R">10.2298/THEO1904005R</a></b></u>

Migration and Modernities

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

Apuntes para la historia de una fraseología del español americano

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-382
Author(s):  
Juan Pedro Sánchez Méndez
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Language ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Spanish

"Notes for the History of a Phraseology of American Spanish. This paper presents the characteristics that would define the historical Hispano-American phraseology as opposed to the European Spanish one. Phraseology is one of the areas in which the greatest variation is perceived among the different Hispanic countries. In this paper I will try to point out the main historical foundations that would explain this variation and the characteristics assumed by what we call the indian or colonial phraseology. This would be the origin of what today we can consider a phraseological Americanism, which presents some characteristics that allow establishing its historical study differentiated from the European Spanish and justifies the necessary diastematic vision of the general historical phraseology of the Spanish language. Keywords: history of American Spanish, historical Hispano-American phraseology, phraseological Americanism, Indian or colonial phraseology. "

A Left History of Liquorice: What It Means to Write "Left" History

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan D. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Historical Study ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article is part of a special Left History series reflecting upon changing currents and boundaries in the practice of left history, and outlining the challenges historians of the left must face in the current tumultuous political climate. This series extends a conversation first convened in a 2006 special edition of Left History (11.1), which asked the question, “what is left history?” In the updated series, contributors were asked a slightly modified question, “what does it mean to write ‘left’ history?” The article charts the impact of major political developments on the field of left history in the last decade, contending that a rising neoliberal and right-wing climate has constructed an environment inhospitable to the discipline’s survival. To remain relevant, Palmer calls for historians of the left to develop a more “open-ended and inclusive” understanding of the left and to push the boundaries of inclusion for a meaningful historical study of the left. To illustrate, Palmer provides a brief materialist history of liquorice to demonstrate the mutability of left history as a historical approach, rather than a set of traditional political concerns.

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