Abstract
In this lecture, the questions that Douglas Cairns wants to ask are the following: what is the relationship between the emotions of characters and audiences in genres such as epic and tragedy; and what role do imagination and visualization play in the mediation of this relationship? But Cairns approaches these via a more limited question: do the emotional responses of audiences depend to any significant extent on forms of mimicry or mirroring of the emotions of characters, and if they do, must these emotions be elicited by direct visual stimuli or can they be set in train by the imagination? This leads to a further question: how does this issue bear on the theory and practice of ancient literature, and can ancient theory and practice help us frame the questions (about audience and readers’ emotions) that we’d like to see answered with the help of modern research in cognitive humanities?
Cairns approaches these questions first via a study that suggests there is a fundamental difference between (a) responding emotionally to the visual stimulus of characters’ emotional expressions in film, and (b) emotional responses that rely on visualization as opposed to vision. He opposes these suggestions with reference both to contemporary cognitive science and to ancient sources on the responses of readers and audiences. Modern research suggests that our witnessing of emotional expressions, postures, and forms of behaviour in others can involve elements of mimicry and mirroring. But it also suggests that the processing of emotion words and concepts, as well as the processing of emotion-eliciting scenarios in verbal narrative, can also involve mimicry, mirroring, and similar embodied reactions. Ancient sources give little or no evidence for presence of the barely detectable micro-gestures that are characteristic of facial and bodily mimicry. This does not mean that they did not occur. But ancient sources also typically make the emotions of poetic audiences third-person, observers’ emotions. Where similarity of response is concerned, they are more interested in convergence between internal and external audiences qua observers of the suffering of focal characters This, is, Cairns argues, a plausible picture of what consumers of verbal and visual narratives actually do experience.
About the lecturer
- Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics at The University of Edinburgh.
Connected events
LCE Salon — Boccaccio and Mansfield
5 September 2023, 2:15 – 6:00 PM