ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions – Collaboratory: Arts and Rhetorics of Emotions in Early Modern Europe

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 
Collaboratory: Arts and Rhetorics of Emotions in Early Modern Europe
University of Queensland, Brisbane, and Toowong Rowing Club (on the UQ campus)
25-27 November, 2013

Keynote Speakers:

Rhetorical theory since the Ancients assumed writers and artists aimed to excite and manipulate the emotions of their audiences. The period in Europe from Renaissance to Enlightenment was one of astonishing inventiveness in literature, art, sculpture, music, and numerous other art forms (design, architecture, the masque). Radically new styles, genres, and expressive practices emerge (opera, the novel). How did these new techniques work to elicit, produce, or condition emotional responses in their audiences? What types of emotional experience did these innovative aesthetic modes make possible? What was the relation of new affective realities to Judeo Christian or classical values?

Topics addressed might include:

  • Rhetoric, oratory, performance, and theatre as emotional technologies
  • Music, dance, and other non-verbal artistic and cultural media and the emotions
  • The passions in Renaissance discourses
  • Affective possibilities of new literary and artistic genres: lyric poetry, the novel, the essay, diaries, scholarly history, lifewriting.
  • Emotional inflections of early modern art movements: Renaissance, neo-classicism, sentimentalism, mannerism.
  • The arts of religion and the emotional styles of everyday life: liturgy, worship, prayer, sermon.
  • Emotional character of Protestantism and the Counter- Reformation
  • Art and rhetoric of sacred and profane passions: enthusiasm, empiricism.
  • Philosophical perspectives on emotion and the emotional colouring of early modern philosophical movements: neostoicism, neo-Platonism, Spinozism, scepticism, Cartesianism, the scientific revolution.
  • The affective dimensions of political discourse and public life.

Collaboratory will include a performance of Johann Christoph Pepusch’s Venus and Adonis, a 1715 masque with a libretto by Colley Cibber on Tuesday 26 November at the UQ Arts Museum.

Register on-line here by 31 October 2013

Enquiries to uqche@uq.edu.au or call (07) 3365-4913.