Talk: Gregory Eiselein -“William James and Emotion’s Literary History”
How did literary understandings of the relationship between emotion and ethics change during the nineteenth century? What role did the work of William James play in these changes? How and why might his work matter to us now?
For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, moral sentimentalism in various forms prevailed within Western literature and Western ideas about emotion and ethics. By the late nineteenth century, however, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and William James’s theory of emotion had begun to reshape literary representations of affect and provide new, often surprising ways to conceptualize emotion’s connection to moral action. This presentation highlights James’s extraordinary role in these changes, while surveying the evolution of Western understandings of the relationships among emotion, ethics, and the arts in the long nineteenth century. This free, public lecture will take place 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 8 – 101 Kimbrough Hall, WSU – Pullman Campus.
Gregory Eiselein is Professor of English and Coffman University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Kansas State University, where he serves as Director of the university’s first-year experience program, K-State First. He is the editor or author of six books, including Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era and the Norton Critical Edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
He is the guest of the WSU Department of English Visiting Scholars Series.
Additional events in this series include:
Free Public Lecture: 5 p.m., Wednesday, April 15 – TBD
Jacqueline Rhodes – “Queer/ed Research: Play, Affect, and Disruption in the Burkean Parlor”
For more information, please contact Kirk McAuley, Associate Professor & Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English: lmcauley@wsu.edu
