Project Affective Dynamics and Aesthetic Emotions

This project aims to develop a theory of the temporal dimension of affective phenomena by the study of emotions in real life and in literary or artistic representations. Our approach will be based on both techniques and results from two disciplines, literature and philosophy. In psychology and philosophy, emotions are usually studied without considering the importance of the passage of time, which is however often subject to narratological analysis literature. What link can be established between the sudden nature of emotion and its transformations in the short and long term? What is the importance of temporality in our assessment of emotion and its consequences? The emotions related to the aesthetic experience have a dual nature. On the one hand, they are aroused by emotional states represented or expressed by fiction - literary or otherwise: sadness, joy of a character, a situation, etc., and the degree of participation, sympathy or antipathy are felt by the reader or viewer, which is in a position of simulation. On the other, the aesthetic emotions are linked to values ​​or aesthetic category: the tragic, the comic, the sublime, the kitsch. Aesthetic emotions can serve as a model to the emotions of real life, because they offer a great variety and richness of intersubjective relations (the player with the character, the narrator with the reader and the narrator or the writer with his characters) . This project will work in interdisciplinary NCCR company with several projects from the human sciences and neuroscience.