In his recent talk as part of our seminar series, Professor Douglas Cairns from Classics talked about his work on emotions in ancient Greek literature, using the example of Euripides’ ‘Hippolytus’. The talk was an intriguing illustration of how literature can give us insights into people’s emotional expressions and moral practices thousands of years ago.
Life is an affective continuum. Affective experiences do not come ready labelled. But emotions also exist in language, and this makes a difference not only to how we study them, but also to the subject matter of the study itself. Douglas discussed the ‘embeddeness’ of emotion, showing how, in the play, Phaedra expresses her emotions by talking about how other people feel, about what happens in the human body, and by using the metaphor of a house to evoke emotion.
In his talk, Douglas asked questions about the role of language and literature in the cross-cultural and historical study of emotion. For example, in both ancient Greek and Latin new words emerged at similar times to identify (and bring into existence?) particular emotion terms (and emotions?), e.g. the Greek syneidesis, and the Latin con-scientia – ancestors of our modern term ‘conscience’.
Analysing the play, Douglas raised questions about the role of emotions for shaping people’s actions (and if and how actions are motivated by our internal commitments or through other people around us) and about the role of physical responses (‘shudder’) in understanding emotions metaphorically and cross-culturally.
Questions asked by the audience included:
- Have men’s emotions been described as embodied and situated in ancient literature in the same way as women’s emotions?
- How has laughter been used and instrumentalised by classic poets and playwrights?
- How do people use non-propositional expressions of emotions in literature and narratives, and what can we take from this for emotion research? (e.g. when emotions are not ‘named’ as such, e.g. happiness, sadness, but instead are articulated ‘between the lines’)
- Is catharsis useful?
Watch Douglas’ video to find out more about his talk.