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What are emotions, where do they originate and how are they brought into being? While from antiquity to early modernity, affects or passions were mostly conceived of as external physiological forces which act upon a passive subject, modern conceptions generally locate emotions within the subject. Drawing on the dichotomy of "interiority / exteriority" as a complex interdependent relationship, they mostly envision emotions as interior processes. Contemporary conceptions of emotion from such different fields as human geography, art history and cognitive sciences recently started to challenge this notion of internal emotions by developing alternative descriptions of externalized emotion.
This book reevaluates premodern, modern and contemporary conceptions of affects, passions and emotion by analyzing various historical manifestations of the discourse on emotion. Unlike most previous research, which especially in the German tradition often focused exclusively on the rise of the modern (Romantic) interiority without paying attention to the underlying dichotomy of "interiority / exteriority", this study aims to explore the historical preconditions, the internal logic and the possible shortcomings that inform our thinking on emotion.
About the author
Rüdiger Campe hat Literaturwissenschaften und Philosophie in Bochum, Freiburg und Paris studiert. Nach seiner Promotion über die Geschichte der Rhetorik und des literarischen Wissens wurde er Assistent an der Universität GH Essen, seit 2001 ist er Professor am Department of German der Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Der Ort der Literatur im Wissen und die rhetorischen Figurationen des Wissens bilden den Kern seiner Arbeiten.
