This project is related to a sub-group of the group MORPHE and aims at addressing the role played by emotions and affects in the history of western societies, especially after the appearance of the groundbreaking works of Descartes and Spinoza. In the last decades the growing interaction between memory and trauma studies in the field of comparative literature and cognition/ and emotions studies in the area of neurosciences has been taken as a guideline.
The project will take into account the evolution of emotional and affective patterns in the public and private spheres from modernity to post-modernity in sociability and its institutions. The research will start from the study of the aesthetic manifestations of modernity, especially of the romantic era, and from the so-called ‘post-modernity’ and their affirmation as exemplar but also problematic and/or deviant representations of affective, emotional or social behaviour, which literature contributed to encode. It will also take into account the role played by other media (radio, film and others) in changing canonized patterns and ‘natural’ expectations.
