Un Automne impensé. Johan Huizinga et l’histoire littéraire française aux XXe-XXIe siècles

Author(s):  
Estelle Doudet
Keyword(s):  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Sullivan ◽  
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild

This introduction surveys the rise of the history of emotions as a field and the role of the arts in such developments. Reflecting on the foundational role of the arts in the early emotion-oriented histories of Johan Huizinga and Jacob Burkhardt, as well as the concerns about methodological impressionism that have sometimes arisen in response to such studies, the introduction considers how intensive engagements with the arts can open up new insights into past emotions while still being historically and theoretically rigorous. Drawing on a wide range of emotionally charged art works from different times and places—including the novels of Carson McCullers and Harriet Beecher-Stowe, the private poetry of neo-Confucian Chinese civil servants, the photojournalism of twentieth-century war correspondents, and music from Igor Stravinsky to the Beatles—the introduction proposes five ways in which art in all its forms contributes to emotional life and consequently to emotional histories: first, by incubating deep emotional experiences that contribute to formations of identity; second, by acting as a place for the expression of private or deviant emotions; third, by functioning as a barometer of wider cultural and attitudinal change; fourth, by serving as an engine of momentous historical change; and fifth, by working as a tool for emotional connection across communities, both within specific time periods but also across them. The introduction finishes by outlining how the special issue's five articles and review section address each of these categories, while also illustrating new methodological possibilities for the field.


Terminus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3 (56)) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Maja Skowron

Women’s Rules of the Game: A Dispute over Women in the Dialogue Il merito delle donne by Moderata Fonte This paper concerns Moderata Fonte (Modesta dal Pozzo), a female Venetian writer who lived in the 16th century, and a dialogue she wrote, Il merito delle donne (On the Value of Women), in which seven women gathered in a garden have a lively discussion about men and their flaws. The author of the study presents the book and Fonte’s biography in the context of the early-modern dispute over women (querelle des femmes). She then analyses Il merito delle donne in terms of the functionality of both the genre in which it was written and the convention of play (game) that is relevant to the work, in order to answer the question of the importance of these devices for the topic Fonte raises. Skowron writes about what makes Il merito delle donne different from other dialogues published at the time by women, as well as from Balthazar Castiglione’s famous Book of the Courtier (Il libro del Cortegiano), and in discussing the motif of the play she uses the definition of the ludic element of Johan Huizinga of Homo ludens. She points to the presence of particular determinants of play in Il merito delle donne, wondering how the voluntary basis of the game, limited time and space, imposed rules or a situation different from ordinary life affect the female characters’ freedom to express their opinions in discussion, as well as the reception of the work itself. Il merito delle donne owes its unique character to its form because it allows not only different views in a dispute over women to be presented, but above all it involves the reader in a discussion which does not end with the last page of the dialogue.


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