Ugly Feelings

Recent years have underscored a range of intense human emotions—daily joys and frustrations, fear, mourning, anger. We have only to look at the daily paper to see the ways in which familiar feelings are deployed to give meaning to local and world events. This course will examine the changing cultural representations of emotion across a range of genres in poetry, fiction, and drama. We will consume broadly, analysing Victorian, modern, and contemporary texts for representations of individual emotions, shared public affects, bodily registers. In particular, we will investigate the forms, operations, and potentials of what we might call “ugly” feelings. We will consider what it means to represent or create feeling through text. How are emotions historically situated and embodied? How do allowed and restrained emotions reveal or enforce patterns of power? Each week will focus on a cultural text and its portrayal of a central feeling: anger, grief, boredom, resentment, fear, disgust, envy, horror.