2000-2001 Center Theme

Structures of Feeling: Passions, Emotions, Moods

As its research theme for 2000-2001, the Center has adopted Structures of Feeling: Passions, Emotions, Moods. The Center invites research proposals from UWM and UW System faculty that address the theorization, historicization, production, and reception of the passions, emotions, and moods across cultures, periods, and nations, and in the arts, literature, music, and media. That passions, emotions, and moods vary from culture to culture, and from the West to the East, and that they have histories are two of our guiding premisses; also axiomatic is that the emotions are gendered and are inflected, in diverse ways, by ideologies of race and class. Passions, emotions, and moods are substantive attitudes toward the world and the self.

In the past fifteen years there has been an outpouring of research on the various modalities of feeling in virtually all of the disciplines, with philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history taking the lead. In philosophical investigations of epistemology, for example, many have argued against the conventional western association of the emotions with irrationality (and with women) and have insisted that the emotions have a cognitive dimension and thus are not opposed to reason. Historians have begun the work of tracing how the emotions change over time in terms of the value they are accorded by a given society, showing, as in the work of Peter Stearns, that certain emotions are fostered by the twentieth-century consumer society at the expense of other emotions. Sociologists have investigated the kind of emotion work that is required to be performed in a service economy as well as the kinds of emotions that are performed in everyday life, with sympathy being a prime example. And anthropologists have studied the ways in which the emotions are practiced differently across cultures, with research often focusing on specific emotions or feeling states--shame, honor, anger, and depression, among them.

In literary studies in the United States much debate has focused on the revision of the canon, which has resulted in nineteenth-century novels and early twentieth-century poetry by women being reclaimed as worthy of study. And in cultural studies an emphasis on texts as symptoms of as well as resistant to dominant ideologies has been key to the investigation of certain emotions--nostalgia, for example. Recent work in media studies addresses the relationship between genre and emotion (as well as mood), exploring how cinematic techniques such as the close-up are deployed to elicit certain emotions, how certain genres establish a space of moods, how certain media both elicit and assuage anxious feelings, and in what ways emotions can be considered "recreational." In rhetorical studies the recuperation of pathos and the research on the strategic use of the commonplace have been central.

Understanding that in the West the emotions are understood predominantly as interiorized private experience, the Center encourages projects that focus on public and/or political passions. These public or political passions might include, for example, grief or the inability to mourn on a national scale (the aftermath of the German Holocaust would be an example), or a passionate rhetoric of the accumulation of wealth that translates into a country's imperialistic drive as triumph (the colonial pursuit of western nation states), or an analysis of state terror (certain Latin American regimes, for instance). Or such projects might focus on Eastern traditions of narrative ethics that conceptualize feeling states in altogether different ways (Buddhist teachings might serve as an example). The Center also encourages inventive ways of formulating research in this broad area. Can emotions be stolen? Can a history of a city be written through the lens of the emotions? Is there a geographics of the emotions much as we might speak of an individual phenomenology of the emotions? How are the emotions marketed and are the emotions themselves a marketing category? What constitutes emotional literacy? What are the risks of empathy? Of compassion? What are narrative emotions? Aesthetic emotions? How are the emotions taught? Can we speak of young emotions and old emotions? Of emotional hybridity? Can the emotions or passions be theorized as possessing a self-reflexive dimension, as has thought? Similarly the Center encourages projects that engage specific emotions that are understudied--trust as an affective attitude, or tact, for example, or embarrassment, one of the sisters of shame.

Ten years ago the Center devoted its research to the theme of "Discourses of the Emotions." In taking up this theme again the Center will build on past research. At the same time, by titling this theme "Structures of Feeling," which alludes to the important work of the British cultural materialist Raymond Williams who formulated the term "structures of feeling" in 1977, the Center wishes to call attention to modalities of feeling as social, and not as merely private or personal, and as a key to emerging social structures. "Methodologically, then, a 'structure of feeling' is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand," Williams writes, "a social experience which is still in process . . . and their connections in a generation or period."

Center for 21st Century Studies

Daniel J. Sherman, Director