Affect poetics
Affect poetics is a comprehensive term for the representations of emotions ( affects ) in poetry . The term is used in three ways: as a historical category within the poetics of the 18th century, as a systematic category for the exploration of literary emotions, and as an interdisciplinary category for the analysis of the languages of emotion .
Historical category
As a historical category, the word field affect poetics plays an important role in the theater reforms of the eighteenth century. Since Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the affects of fear and compassion have been the central effect of the affect poetics of drama or of bourgeois tragedy . This discussion relates to the poetics of Aristotle , according to which the tragedy is about the affects Eleos and Phobos triggered by the construction of the action , with the joy of tragic mimesis culminating in the solution or purification in the sense of catharsis . Lessing and, before him, Moses Mendelssohn , based on the definition of tragedy in the sixth book of Aristotelian Poetics, determined the excitement of Phobos and Eleos, of fear and pity, and the purification of these affects as the real goal of tragedy. Lessing related the purification of pity, fear “and similar affects” to the viewer as well, but interpreted them as the transformation of these affects “into virtuous skills”.
Another historical sense of affect poetics arises from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's Poetics of Emotional Excitation: In the Thoughts on the Nature of Poetry published in 1759 it says: “The essence of poetry consists in the fact that, with the help of language, it can contain a certain number of Objects, which we know or whose existence we suspect, shows from one side, which occupies the most noble forces of our soul in such a high degree that one acts on the other and thereby sets the whole soul in motion. ”Aim of poetics Klopstocks is to bring about such a movement of mind through an interplay between passion and belief, affect and denomination, art and spirituality. As affective expression in the mid-1760s found similar definitions of poetry even in Gerstenberg , Sulzer and especially Herder , the lyric as the work of "natural poet" and defined as "direct expression of feeling" and so the path of imitation poetics Gottscheds towards The poetics of experience and expression of the aesthetic of genius paved the way.
Systematic category
In addition to the reception theories of aesthetic affects that arose in the mid-1990s - based on “feelings when reading” - a production aesthetic of literary-aesthetic affects developed in the course of an emotional turn in cultural studies after 2000 . Thomas Anz speaks of the cultural techniques of emotionalization . Simone Winko uses the term encoded feelings in the poetry of literary modernism and analyzes the rules of emotional meaning in and of literary texts. In contrast to the aesthetic reception resulting feelings of the reader, listener and viewer, the term therefore referred the affect poetics the coding or modeling literary emotions in literary texts and genres themselves: Burkhard Meyer-Sickendieks systematic affective poetics studied in this poetological sense " Mourning in the elegy ”, the“ enthusiasm in the hymn ”, the“ guilt in the tragedy ”, the“ longing in the melodrama ”, the“ fear in fairy tales ”, the“ happiness in the idyll ”, the“ hope in the utopia ", The" pain in the literary diary "or the" aggression in satire ". Affect poetics bears a cultural-historical sign in this model, i.e. it analyzes the historical transformations of literary affects: for example, fear based on the genre history of the fairy tale in its transition from folk tales to art fairy tales .
Interdisciplinary category
The term affect poetics is currently used to describe a separate research field within the Languages of Emotion Cluster of Excellence at the Free University of Berlin . The research areas, divided into modules, examine affect poetics in the arts and art-related discourses in the double frame of reference of affect theoretical hypothesis formation in rhetoric , poetics, aesthetics and scientific theory formation on the one hand, and modeling and the experimental perspective in psychology and neuroscience on the other.
See also
literature
- Henrike F. Alfes: literature and feeling. Emotional aspects of literary writing and reading , Opladen 1995, ISBN 3531126458 .
- Thomas Anz: Cultural Techniques of Emotionalization. Observations, reflections and suggestions for literary research on feeling . In: Karl Eibl / Katja Mellmann / Rüdiger Zymner: In the back of cultures . Paderborn 2007, ISBN 3897854546 , pp. 207-239.
- Mathias Brütsch / Vinzenz Hediger / Ursula von Keitz / Alexandra Schneider / Margrit Tröhler (eds.): Kinogefühle. Emotionality and Film , Marburg 2005, ISBN 3894725125 .
- Karl S. Guthke: The discovery of the self in poetry. From imitation to expression of affects . In: tradition, norm, innovation. Social and traditional literary behavior in the early days of the German Enlightenment . Edited by Wilfried Barner . Munich 1989 (= Writings of the Historisches Kolleg. Kolloquien, 15), ISBN 3486547712 , pp. 93–124.
- Klaus Herding / Bernhard Stumpfhaus (ed.): Pathos, affect, feeling. The emotions in the arts . Walter de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3110177358 .
- Evelyne Keitel: About the feelings when reading. For reading contemporary American literature , Munich 1996, ISBN 3770530764 .
- Antje Krause-Wahl / Heike Oehlschlägel / Serjoscha Wiemer (eds.): Affekte. Analyzes of aesthetic-media processes , Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 389942459X .
- Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek : Affect poetics. A cultural history of literary emotions , Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3826030656 .
- Hermann Wiegmann (Ed.): The aesthetic passion. Texts on the doctrine of affect in the 17th and 18th centuries 18th century. Selected and commented . Hildesheim: G. Olms 1987 (German Texts and Studies, Volume 27), ISBN 3-487-07840-6
- Simone Winko: Coded feelings. On a poetics of emotions in lyrical and poetological texts around 1900 . Berlin 2003, ISBN 3503061878 .
Web links
- Site of the Excellence Cluster Languages of Emotion at the Free University of Berlin
- Study on historical affect poetics