Daniel M. Gross
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226485034
- eISBN:
- 9780226485171
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226485171.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 1 argues that Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can serve as a foundational text for a humanities approach to emotion, but only if it is first disentangled ...
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Chapter 1 argues that Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can serve as a foundational text for a humanities approach to emotion, but only if it is first disentangled from its heavy-handed editor Paul Ekman and his basic emotions program, which has done Darwin a profound disservice. So liberated, the chapter then argues, Darwin's science of emotion provides a reference point for scholars in the humanities now trying to make their literary criticism speak to natural science. The photograph, illustration, and story-filled Expression is both rhetorical and inseparable from its science that we sometimes imagine transcending its bookish material. This chapter recalls how Darwin's Expression foregrounds the inherent rhetoricity of emotion, thereby outstripping Ekman's science of emotion that claims to follow in its wake, and which has recently found some advocates in the new subfield of Cognitive Approaches to Literature. Instead, the chapter argues that Darwin's rhetoric of emotion is remarkably skeptical, which does not diminish its scientific piquancy, but rather aligns it with our situated theories in the science of cognition mobilized, among other places, by the philosopher of biology Alva Noë.Less
Chapter 1 argues that Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can serve as a foundational text for a humanities approach to emotion, but only if it is first disentangled from its heavy-handed editor Paul Ekman and his basic emotions program, which has done Darwin a profound disservice. So liberated, the chapter then argues, Darwin's science of emotion provides a reference point for scholars in the humanities now trying to make their literary criticism speak to natural science. The photograph, illustration, and story-filled Expression is both rhetorical and inseparable from its science that we sometimes imagine transcending its bookish material. This chapter recalls how Darwin's Expression foregrounds the inherent rhetoricity of emotion, thereby outstripping Ekman's science of emotion that claims to follow in its wake, and which has recently found some advocates in the new subfield of Cognitive Approaches to Literature. Instead, the chapter argues that Darwin's rhetoric of emotion is remarkably skeptical, which does not diminish its scientific piquancy, but rather aligns it with our situated theories in the science of cognition mobilized, among other places, by the philosopher of biology Alva Noë.
