The Global Sentimentality Project

Third party funded individual grant

Start date : 01.04.2019

Website: https://www.sentimental.phil.fau.de/

• Overview

   

• Publications

  (9)

Project details

Scientific Abstract

The Global Sentimentality Project is conducted by a network of scholars interested in the sentimental. The aesthetics and politics of the sentimental are examined in four research fields that identify different areas of concentration. The Project facilitates exchange and collaboration across disciplines in workshops, lecture series, and public talks as well as in joint publications, among other formats.  

What makes us cry? Where do we allow ourselves to cry? And when do we enjoy being moved to tears? In other words, what are the forms and functions of the sentimental? The Global Sentimentality Project examines how the sentimental unfolds its power as an aesthetic narrative strategy, as a practice of crisis management, and as a technology of political mobilization. Our understanding of the sentimental revises the stigmatization of the term in popular parlance and extends its meaning beyond a set of literary texts. The sentimental shapes aesthetic experiences of all kinds. It operates in different cultural settings and in various political contexts where it has been analyzed as either facilitating or obstructing change. The Global Sentimentality Project brings together scholars from around the world and from different disciplines in order to compare the workings of the sentimental across cultures, social formations, and historical periods. The research activities of the Global Sentimentality Project are organized around four themes, which intersect and overlap.

Research field 1 “Sentimental state narratives” examines how citizens are affectively interpellated through sentimental props in political rhetoric and cultural practices. The projects subsumed under this theme investigate how intimate relations and familial bonds are symbolically related to the imagined community of the nation – and vice versa – in both affirmative as well as resistant ways.

Research field 2 “Sentimentality and rights” looks at the role of sentimental narratives in social movements and political agenda setting on a national and a transnational level. The projects under this header are concerned with sentimentally evoked and legitimized forms of civil rights and human rights, along with projects of cultural memory and reparative justice, and the way these are enacted and challenged.

Research field 3 “World literatures and the sentimental” analyzes the tension between culture specific repertoires of the sentimental in national literatures vis-à-vis a transcultural literary typology of sentimentalism. The projects grouped here also seek to account for forms of cultural mobility and cultural transfer of the sentimental across the globe. The label “world literature” will be scrutinized with regard to its own investment in discourses both of the sentimental and anti-sentimental.

Research field 4 “Visual cultures and the sentimental” is interested in how the sentimental is produced by and itself generative of specific scoping regimes – and how these have been read in diachronic and synchronic perspective. While some of these regimes loom large (the aesthetics of Hollywood melodrama, for instance), projects in this field also examine the less obvious and lesser known forms of visually rendering and critiquing sentimentality.

Involved:

Contributing FAU Organisations:

Funding Source

Research Areas

The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics Field of Research