F, 9:30 AM-12:00 PM, C2 272

Open to Graduates Only!

Course meets with CMCL-C705

Instructor: John Lucaites
E-Mail: lucaites@indiana.edu
Office: C2 245
Phone: 855-5411

The tension between “reason” and “emotion” constitutes one of the
central sites for consideration of the advantages and disadvantages
of democratic living.  From Plato forward there has been a
continuing debate regarding the degree to which a properly
functioning democratic politics needs to nurture and/or discipline
the possibilities for and enactment of the public expression of
emotion and emotionality.  From one perspective emotions are
primitive subjective states of feeling that exist over and against
reason (as a “higher faculty”) and are thus a danger to democratic,
public, rational-decision making.  From this perspective emotions
are a properly private consideration and should be relegated to
private life and the domestic sphere.  Public emotions must thus be
carefully controlled and repressed.  From another perspective,
emotions are not one thing; they include feelings (bodily affect),
cognitions, and symbolic representations, and they develop into
complex negotiated responses to events and social relationships.
Rather than to denote a narrow sense of private affect, they are
inherently cultural and social phenomena –  intersubjective moods
created by (a) the performance of appropriate gestures in a social
space and by (b ) representations that activate prior structures of
response.  As such, emotions provide resources for participation and
problem solving within a group, producing cohesion, persuasion, and
good judgment that would not otherwise occur.  From this
perspective, democratic citizenship cannot be exercised (i.e., as an
embodied way of reacting to the world) unless it is effectively
emotional since both deliberation and social or political action
require the full range of emotional identification with others.  The
result then is that the quality of life in a community and the
quality of deliberation in a democratic polity depend on the range,
sophistication, and use of emotional display.

This seminar will operate against the backdrop of this centuries
long debate with a primary focus on the forms and functions of
political emotions and public emotionality in U.S. public culture.
Our chief goal will be to contribute to a rhetorical history of
public emotions with an eye to participating in contemporary
critical and theoretical discussions about the relationship between
rhetoric and democracy, citizenship, civil society, and the like.
Readings will draw from a wide range of disciplines, including
rhetoric, media studies, anthropology, social and political theory,
law, gender studies, social and cultural history, philosophy, and
literary criticism, and will include classical, modern, and
contemporary writings ranging from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Peter Stearns, American
Cool.  Throughout we will have sustained attention on historically
particular and rhetorically material instances of the enactment and
performance of political emotions in U.S. public culture.

The course will be organized as a research seminar organized around
common readings and semester long student projects.  The course will
be cross-listed with AMST G751 Seminar in American Studies.