Rebecca F. McNamara CHE Literary Emotions Methodologies Study Day
University of Sydney University of Melbourne, October 11, 2013
Emotional Communities and Literary Genre
Rebecca F. McNamara, University of Sydney
Today I am going to talk about some thoughts I have been mulling over recently in relation to emotional communities and literary genre, in the view of sparking some discussion about how some of the existing methodologies for the history of emotions can be useful for the literary scholar.
One of the readings included in the reading pack for this Study Day was the introductory chapter of Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, which we will have an opportunity to discuss further in the afternoon session. In the introduction to her book, Rosenwein writes:
I postulate the existence of “emotional communities”: groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions. More than one emotional community may exist—indeed normally does exist—contemporaneously, and these communities may change over time. Some come to the fore to dominate our sources, then recede in importance. Others are almost entirely hidden from us, though we may imagine they exist and may even see some of their effects on more visible groups.[1]
When I began my CHE project in 2011, it seemed that the majority of ‘history of emotions’ scholarship was written by historians, like Rosenwein, particularly for the medieval period. That is quickly changing as more and more literary scholars publish work on emotions. But when I began first reading up on history of emotions, Rosenwein’s approach more than other (mostly historian) scholars’ approaches stood out to me. It was not until earlier this year, as I was editing an article that Juanita Ruys and I had co-written for a special issue of Exemplaria on emotions (edited by Stephanie Trigg), that I identified why the concept of emotional communities was so appealing to me as a medievalist and literary scholar.
I had an ‘aha’ moment as I was trying to figure out how we could better integrate with history of emotions methodologies some of the analysis that Juanita had done on early and late medieval first-person life narratives [change slide] —sort of precursors to autobiography—by Peter Abelard, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Thomas Hoccleve, and Margery Kempe. I realized that I was looking at the expressions of a possible suicidal mindset or suicide attempt in those texts not as ‘genuine’ iteration of an internal process for each of these writers, but more as a characteristic of the overarching genre that they were writing: [change slide] first-person life narrative. Abelard, Caesarius, Hoccleve, and Kempe span three centuries, they lived in different parts of the medieval European world, and they had different kinds and levels of educational, religious, and professional training. Yet all four were spurred by events in their lives, particularly crises of faith and subsequent social upheavals, to write in a similar testimonial tone about their lives. It was the genre of this group that, for me, pulled together their disparate experiences, educations, and gender, rather than the fact that they happened to all write about suicidal mindsets or actions.
Rosenwein had precipitated this kind of ‘generic’ analysis when she remarked in her book that [change slide] ‘An emotional community is a group in which people have a common stake, interests, values, and goals. This it is often a social community. But it is also possibly a “textual community,” created and reinforced by ideologies, teachings, and common presuppositions’.[2] If I’m reading her correctly, I think that by ‘textual communities’ Rosenwein is referring to communities of people who write and/or read the same texts, as well as groups of texts, ([change slide] such as, she implies, the writers, readers, and textual collection of medieval hagiography, she writes that their intended audience would use them as ‘models of behavior and attitude’... ‘the readers of these lives took that purpose seriously’). So Rosenwein seems interested in the social emotional function of texts within a community.
Rosenwein mentions genre directly towards the end of her introduction, in discussing the issue of whether historical research on emotional communities can reveal ‘real emotions’ [change slide]: ‘Then, too, do not genres dictate the “emotional tenor” that a text will have, quite independently from any supposed community? Finally, are texts not full of topoi, repeated commonplaces derived from other places, sources, and eras? What can topoi tell us about real feeling’.[3] Indeed, Rosenwein goes so far as to admit that ‘genre’ is an impediment to the type of historical research she is doing [change slide]: ‘The constraints of genre admittedly pose a problem. Might not the well-meaning historian mistake a particular genre, with its rules of expression, for an “emotional community?” [...And here we can see that she is most focused on groups of people, rather than texts...] I have tried to overcome this potential pitfall by drawing together different kinds of sources. ... [change slide] The rules of genre were not, however, ironclad. They themselves were “social products”—elaborated by people under certain conditions and with certain goals in mind—and they could be drawn upon and manipulated with some freedom. Like Isen and Diamond’s “automatic habits,” they shaped emotional expression even as they themselves were used and bent so as to be emotionally expressive’.[4]
Thus the differences between Rosenwein’s historical approach to emotional communities and my approach as a literary scholar to use emotional communities to think about literature are clear: the dictation and manipulation of ‘emotional tenor’ is in fact precisely what I am concerned with. Rather than seeing genre as a pitfall to recognizing emotional communities of people, I am interested in the ways in which the conventions and manipulations of genre were characterized by emotions.
As a literary scholar who gets slightly anxious at the prospect of assigning too much influence to the ‘author’ and his or her motivations, and is much more comfortable analyzing literature in terms of ‘language’ or ‘stylistics’ or ‘rhetoric’, recasting ‘genre’ as lens through which I can talk about emotions allows more freedom for me to think about how I can talk about emotions in a literary text.
Since that ‘aha’ moment, which is quite straightforward in hindsight, I’ve seen the usefulness of translating the concept of emotional communities, as formulated by an historian, into a tool for theorizing history of emotions in literature. [change slide] Looking back at Rosenwein’s definition of her emotional communities, I can easily replace some of her concepts with those related to literary study.
So Rosenwein’s emotional communities are groups of people created and defined by ‘emotional norms’. Literary genre, rather, can be defined ([change slide] by John Frow, for example), as texts (or other forms of expression—such as visual arts, film, music)— which are organized by the ‘overlapping and intersecting dimensions’ of ‘formal organisation, ... rhetorical structure, and ...thematic content’.[5] Emotions are not clearly a basic organizing feature for genre. Or are they?
[change slide]
Old English lament...
Medieval love complaint...
Medieval Romance...
Literature of affective meditation...
... [change slide]
Dramatic tragedy and comedy...
Elegy (and mock elegy)...
Gothic novel (especially as compared with the Novel)...
War writing...
Confessional poetry...
Misery Lit...
Looking at this brief list, we can see that emotions can be said to inflect these genres in various ways [change slide] —for example, [change slide] through the language and style that is used; [change slide] by characterizing the central themes of the genre; [change slide] through the rhetorical position of the writer; [change slide] and through the rhetorical effects that were meant to act upon an audience or readership. Can we say that particular genres [change slide] ‘act’ like ‘emotional communities’, valuing, using, or transmitting similar emotional features— [change slide] and how might the particular emotional features of a genre shift across time.
Emotional Communities/ Genre and ‘defined space’
To transform another aspect of ‘emotional communities’ into a lens for literary scholarship in the history of emotions, I turn to another facet of textual study. Rosenwein comments on the prospective usefulness of studying emotional communities ‘contemporaneous with one another in some defined space’ [by which she refers to physical space—such as geography, and features such as cities]. This makes me wonder how studies of emotion in relation to literary genre might also benefit from considering genres that overlap not only temporally but physically— [change slide] many of us in this room are medievalists and early modernists, and come into contact with manuscript miscellanies, can we consider how emotions might characterize or organize a manuscript miscellany [change slide] where multiple genres overlap, sometimes on the same folios.
And of course many manuscripts were produced in piecemeal or programmatic form, [change slide] where one or more scribes wrote text, and then others in the same or different production circles filled in visual images, or even musical notation. We know from the production and provenance of some manuscripts that this process was sometimes done simultaneously, with an overarching direction of the project, sometimes the process was entirely separated, with text being produced in France, for example, and a few decades later, an illuminator adding images in England. The opposite is also true, [change slide] with illuminations (i.e. picture bibles) appearing first, and written text later glossing the images. How does emotion organize what’s going on in these physically overlapping genres (if we can call them genres)—does emotion connect more strongly certain visual and textual genres where formal connections seem weak?
Genre makes literary scholars an emotional community
To wrap up, I would like to reflect for a moment on some comments made by James Simpson when he took part in the ‘Middle English Literature and Emotions’ study day here in Melbourne in July. Simpson spoke about an article he published earlier this year in New Literary History: ‘‘Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual “Face”’. In this article, he distinguishes between the ‘new’, ‘original’ discoveries of scientific knowledge and the recovery and re-discovery of ‘already known knowledge’ by new readers that he casts as the subject of humanistic study. [change slide] Simpson sees literary knowledge as ‘recognitional’— our interpretations as literary scholars, these ‘recognitions’, are not repetitions of what has happened in the past, because for each of us and for every new generation in these literary recognitions we ‘see a truth—we know the place, we see a face—as for the first time, and as unique’.[6] He goes on to talk about genre and topoi: [change slide] saying that ‘we as readers... supply our presuppositions about the text to make it leap into life, and we supply those presuppositions by recognizing what kind of text it is’. [7] He talks in the article about recognizing [change slide] ‘textual face’, which he defines as global genre and local trope—the commonplaces we use to interpret texts.
Simpson extends his argument to talk about how this recognition of ‘textual face’, is a cognitive and an affective process. [change slide] He says that, for us as literary scholars ‘our own moment of recognition [of genre and topoi] is marked by that pleasurable interlock of heightened emotion and cognition’.[8] And furthermore, [change slide] ‘serious readers are likely to enjoy the experience of recognizing textual face... [and] our recognition of textual face implies, and realizes, a transformative affective claim we make on that known face’. [9]
If we take Simpson a step further, we could say that the very subject of genre itself makes us, as scholars, an emotional community. That is, the experience of recognizing genre is a cognitively and emotionally transformational experience, and one that each of us in this room shares with each other and our literary colleagues worldwide. Now, before I start singing ‘kumbaya’, I’ll summarize some of the points I’ve made: [change slides]
• Emotional community as genre: can Rosenwein’s emotional communities include literary genres? Rather than groups of people, we can consider literary genres as they are characterized by shared emotion?
• What would we mean by this?
• Identify emotions conveyed in a genre, their language, gestures, etc?
• Assign overarching emotional norms to a particular genre?
• Identify emotional rhetorical stance for the construction of a genre (lament and elegy—premised on loss)
• Gauge audiences’ emotional reception of particular genres?
• Emotional Communities within a ‘defined space’: literary genre and ‘defined [physical] space’ as characterized by emotion
• anthology, miscellany, other collections
• overlapping genres on the same medium
• Genre makes us an emotional community
• Study of genre identifies literary scholars as an emotional community, mutually engaged in ‘recognizing’ genre/topoi to interpret meaning
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[1] Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 2.
[2] Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 25.
[3] Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 27.
[4] Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 27.
[5] John Frow, Genre (The New Critical Idiom) (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 4.
[6] James Simpson, ‘Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual “Face”’, New Literary History 44 (2013), 25-44; p. 26.
[7] Simpson, ‘Cognition is Recognition’, p. 31.
[8] Simpson, ‘Cognition is Recognition’, p. 32.
[9] Simpson, ‘Cognition is Recognition’, pp. 42-43.