Details
MIXED FEELINGS: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIXED AFFECT IN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
Ambivalent emotions, conflicting passions, bittersweet feelings: such experiences are commonplace, but more complex than suggested by ordinary language usage and currently available scientific models. Taking a cross-cultural and a multidisciplinary perspective, this conference aims to enrich our understanding of the phenomenology of mixed affective experiences. It brings together experts in philosophy, psychology, classics, literature, and art to explore narrative representations of mixed emotions in historical and literary works, as well as the theorization of such experiences in both Western and Eastern traditions.
A conference funded by the Anneliese Maier Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
SLUB/Klemperer-Saal, Technische Universität Dresden, 6–8 June 2023
Programme
Tuesday 6 June
2pm Christian Prunitsch (Dresden) | Douglas Cairns (Edinburgh): Welcome
2.15pm Pia Campeggiani (Bologna), Marco Viola (Rome), Valentina Petrolini (UPV/EHU): Introduction
3.15pm Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster): Explaining (away?) the apparent contradiction of conflicting emotions: a view from Sanskrit aesthetic phenomenology
4.45pm Curie Virág (Edinburgh): Being of two minds: the landscape of longing in 11th-century China
6pm Keynote: Mieke Bal (Amsterdam): Literary ambivalence: connecting past and present in moving mutuality through characters who enact, embody, and figure it
Wednesday 7 June
10am Marco Caracciolo (Ghent): Mixed affect and the difficulty of reality in video game experiences
11.30am Ernst van Alphen (Leiden): What is affect and how does it operate?
1.30pm Eric Cullhed (Uppsala): Kissing the joy as it flies: the mixed valence of so-called lyrical emotions
2.30pm Mario Baumann (Dresden): Bittersweet history: Cicero on mixed affect in experiencing literature
4pm Donncha O’Rourke (Edinburgh): Odi et amo: on some ancient readings of Catullan mixed affect
5.30pm Keynote Ursula Hess (HU Berlin): Mixed emotions in emotion communication
Thursday 8 June
9.30am Angela Ganter (Regensburg): Back to uncivilized roots? Ambivalent feelings towards pastoralism in Roman cults of the Late Republic and the Augustan era
10.30am Lars Koch (Dresden): Fear, heroism, media anthropology: observations on Ernst Jünger's literature of the First World War
12 noon Dagmar Ellerbrock (Dresden): Speeding up and slowing down: the multivalent effects of mixed feelings in historical interactions and transformation
1pm end of conference
The meeting is open to all without charge, but for administrative and catering purposes please inform antje.junghanss@tu-dresden.de if you plan to attend.