This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

Early sensation novels such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne use the eighteenth-century notion of sentiment in very distinct manners. These novels demonstrate a perspective in transition regarding sentimentality in how they apply sentimental qualities to very specific character types. Some characters are extremely sentimental, whereas others appear completely void of emotion and are even described as automata. These sensation novels even feature sentimental journeys and objects, as well as allusions to sentimental novels such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. The occurrence of sentimentality in these sensation novels aligns characters into two categories: those that are controlled (and in some instances debilitated) by sentiment, and those that can control their feelings. Thus, the sensation novel calls into question the authenticity of emotional expression as it is represented in the sentimental literary tradition. Existing research on these novels tends to focus on gender and madness, a majority of which focuses specifically on madwomen. Instances of women being driven to madness, however, also coincides with a pattern of sentimental behaviors that male characters share. These overly sentimental characters rarely, if ever, demonstrate rational thinking, and are cast in a negative light. In contrast, the sensation novel casts non-sentimental characters of both genders as skeptics and investigators who generally meet felicitous ends. This thesis will contribute to existing scholarship on sensation fiction by taking into account how these novels treat excessive affect as a sign of generic critique rather than just a biological symptom of a pathologized woman.

This document examines the theory behind the process leading to my paintings, as well as the content of the images I use. The former will invoke romanticism, infinite possibilities, and the need for having certain parameters and flexible rules. The latter will talk about sentimentality and contemporary culture. I will explain the mechanics of justifying the choice of a particular way of painting: the push and pull between the loaded content of an image versus the language of painting itself.

Over the last century, Americans have come to understand literature as a powerful tool for shaping individuals and society. Indeed, this perception of literature animates how Americans have and continue to debate what books to include—or exclude—in secondary school curricula. Texts dealing with issues of race, gender, and sexuality have proven especially controversial. This dissertation examines the claims people make about how reading literature can change readers and society through moral lessons. It offers case studies focused on three books that have been celebrated, banned, and taught in terms of their potential to inform readers’ moral and empathetic development: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). This dissertation shows how assumptions about literature’s ability to inform a readers’ moral and empathetic development can be better understood in relation to the tradition of sentimental literature—a genre and rhetorical mode of storytelling aimed to promote moral and social reform by evoking certain feelings in readers. The case studies illustrate instances when the didactic rhetorical models of sentimental literature appear as a mode of reading and interpretation, which I refer to as sentimental hermeneutics. Building on studies of religion, literature, and secularism, this dissertation analyzes the religious dimensions that emerge in the ostensibly secular interpretive methods and ‘universal’ moral frameworks used to teach and interpret these texts. Contemporary sentimental hermeneutics are indebted to an historical synthesis between Christian devotional reading practices and sentimental fiction in the 19th century. The novels examined are at various levels of conformity and dissonance with the rhetorical modes and religious foundations of this sentimental tradition. My study shows how the unacknowledged religious lineage of interpretive and moral frameworks commonly used to teach these books enacts certain religious, social, and ontological exclusions. Each case study outlines limits of sentimental hermeneutics and the analysis of Beloved offers an alternative framework for readerly empathy. By restoring to view the often-hidden religious histories of these reading strategies, this project pushes readers to parochialize the universalizing claims of these ostensibly secular moral messages: it calls for a form of reading that moves past the exclusions of sentimental hermeneutics.

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<p>This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.</p> / Dissertation

This study argues that the American citizen’s choice to perform or not perform sacrificial national duties has been heavily mediated by sentimental representations of sacrifice in popular narratives. Through an analysis of the American captivity narrative from its origins in the seventeenth century up to its current state in the contemporary period, this project also asserts that race plays a central a role in defining the type of citizen who should perform the most traumatic and costly of national sacrifices. Based on the implied reader’s sentimental identification with the suffering, white female captive, clear racial and cultural demarcations are made between the captor and the captive. These strong demarcations are facilitated through the captive’s choice to perform sacrifices that will sustain her social and racial status as a privileged and authentic identity. Her successful defense of her cultural and racial purity from a racialized threat heightens her ethos, investing her marginalized identity with power and influence. This representation of the suffering, sacrificial female captive who gains legitimacy via her fulfillment of national duty offers a sentimental model of civic duty for American citizenry to emulate. In addition, the sentimental representation of sacrifice in the captivity narrative not only stabilizes an authentic national collective, but also suggests to marginalized persons that national sacrifice can supply legitimacy and privilege. In opposition to this narrative representation of legitimacy gained through sacrifice, Indigenous authors Mourning Dove and Leslie Marmon Silko depict the sentimental performance of sacrificial duty as a dangerous discourse that internally colonizes those who desire legitimacy in the United States. These Indigenous counter-narratives show clearly that the narrativization of sentimentality and sacrifice more often than not defines America and its authentically pure citizens as worth the price of death.

This study argues that the American citizen’s choice to perform or not perform sacrificial national duties has been heavily mediated by sentimental representations of sacrifice in popular narratives. Through an analysis of the American captivity narrative from its origins in the seventeenth century up to its current state in the contemporary period, this project also asserts that race plays a central a role in defining the type of citizen who should perform the most traumatic and costly of national sacrifices. Based on the implied reader’s sentimental identification with the suffering, white female captive, clear racial and cultural demarcations are made between the captor and the captive. These strong demarcations are facilitated through the captive’s choice to perform sacrifices that will sustain her social and racial status as a privileged and authentic identity. Her successful defense of her cultural and racial purity from a racialized threat heightens her ethos, investing her marginalized identity with power and influence. This representation of the suffering, sacrificial female captive who gains legitimacy via her fulfillment of national duty offers a sentimental model of civic duty for American citizenry to emulate. In addition, the sentimental representation of sacrifice in the captivity narrative not only stabilizes an authentic national collective, but also suggests to marginalized persons that national sacrifice can supply legitimacy and privilege. In opposition to this narrative representation of legitimacy gained through sacrifice, Indigenous authors Mourning Dove and Leslie Marmon Silko depict the sentimental performance of sacrificial duty as a dangerous discourse that internally colonizes those who desire legitimacy in the United States. These Indigenous counter-narratives show clearly that the narrativization of sentimentality and sacrifice more often than not defines America and its authentically pure citizens as worth the price of death.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby is a novel that evaluates modern spaces both abstract and physical, especially in regards to an individual’s experience in and attachment to domestic, regulated space as a source of identity, intimacy, and spatial representation. My thesis demonstrates how the destabilization of domestic space as a result of loss and grief led the characters of the novel to question their normative perceptions of space, and in turn, incited them to produce a new kind of space, a heterotopia, to compensate for their loss of identity and place in the world. The critical analysis of this text within this thesis demonstrates how Chuck Palahniuk employs his literary style, complex characters, and surreal plot to highlight the significance of how individuals interact and are affected by space, especially in regards to identity and relationships within society, particularly when confronting cognitive dissonance and uncanny affect. By assessing the haunting attributes of domestic space, the heterotopia that arises from cognitive dissonance, and the sentimental traits that anchor us to certain social spaces, readers will be able to value the influence of spatial practice, not only in the novel, but also in everyday life.