In the 18th Century, Western thinkers took up the Enlightenment project of binding societies into a single narrative, which continues to define modern discourses on sentiment and propriety. Within this historic context, and its long legacy into modern thought, individual feelings that contradict the resulting social constructions have been pushed to the peripheries or banned altogether.  This complication of order and feeling seems to operate bilaterally: the subjective and individualized domain of “feeling” disrupts the desired simplicity of rules and regulations that seek to contain knowable societies, legible moral codes, and disciplined human subjects. Meanwhile, if sensation, affect, and emotion are oriented without frameworks, how can the human experience be unified and societies or individuals be imagined as interconnected? This conference seeks to wrestle with the precarious relationship between rules and feelings, reason and emotion, and ask how cultural and literary interventions of thought in/after the 18th century have worked to sculpt historical and modern optics on these perpetually entangled entities. 

Papers will address the following themes and questions:

Literature & Culture:  Do literary and cultural works create a forum to discuss sentiments society deems taboo? Do they do the political work of constructing societal norms? 
Politics & Emotion:  Does emotion articulate political projects?  What is emotion’s political utility? How does emotion affect empathy and virtue? What effects do rules and limitations have on the emotions, particularly the passions?
Literature & Emotion:  How does one affect the other?  How has 18th century sentimentality affected the shift from the collective to the individual?  
Emotion & Identity:  How does emotion (re)define a collective sense of human identity? How does individual identity destabilize the discourse in which it takes place? Has the discourse destabilized or gendered self judgement?
Empathy & Sentiment:  What conditions allow empathy to function? Can empathy fail? Can it be enacted through literary forms?

See Full Schedule Here.

This graduate student conference is planned, organized, and conducted by the students in "Sense and Sensibility: Ethics and Emotions in the 18th Century" (German 590/English 524), winter 2021.