Art and Affect
Event Details
- Date:
- Wednesday, 12 July 2017 - Friday, 14 July 2017
- Time:
- All Day
- Location:
- Toowong Rowing Club, 37 Keith Street, St. Lucia, QLD 4072
- URL:
- http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/art-and-affect/
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Ms Xanthe Ashburner
- Phone:
- 54913
- Email:
- x.ashburner@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Humanities and Social Sciences
Event Description
- Full Description:
- 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 fulfilment, 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 passionate 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’.