…the poets…are enamored of the passions as such…
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1881)
From antiquity to the present, literature and the arts have been associated with the solicitation of the passions. Thus a profound tradition, stretching from Plato’s dialogues to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and beyond, has viewed art’s engagement of the passions as a form of bewitchment, opening the way to dangerous psychological, moral, and political disorder. An equally powerful mode of thought, however (much championed by the Romantics) has conceived of art’s investment in the affective life positively, as a route to personal fulfillment, a vehicle for social sympathy, or as nourishing the imaginative powers necessary to bring about progressive political change. Still other traditions find in art capacities for governing, or subduing, merely passional attachments and drives. This conference, hosted by the UQ Node of the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions, will explore the long and complex history of the relation between aesthetic production and concepts of ‘the passions’.
Keynote speakers
Helen Deutsch (UCLA)
Joshua Scodel (The University of Chicago)
D. Vance Smith (Princeton University)
A full program is available here. Registration includes entry to ‘War of the Buffoons’, a concert of Baroque music performed by the Badinerie Players on original instruments (12 July, 5:30-7pm, University of Queensland Art Museum).
Free. All welcome. Register online by 7 July 2017.
Inquiries: uqche@uq.edu.au
Image: Guido Reni (Italian, 1575‒1642), Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, c.1630, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.