Feeling, Meaning, and Culture

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

We all have feelings. But, do we all experience them in the same way? Do we feel love in the same way in French, Arabic, Japanese, and Russian? What about rage? Or melancholy? To what extent do our languages and cultures allow us to express how we feel–about ourselves, others, and the world? And, how might our languages and cultures limit or mute what we feel and how we articulate our feelings? How does moving linguistically across cultures affect how we feel, if at all? What might tracking the nuances of emotions and feelings across cultures offer us? In this course, we will explore these questions through a humanistic approach by focusing on how different language traditions articulate love–and examine how this specific articulation manifests in culture in a variety of ways, including the politics of love and love as politics. Throughout the course, we will explore how language, and the historical wake all languages carry, mediates our emotions. In turn, we will also explore how our emotions have an impact on our languages as overladen, superannuated tools that not only transmit information but also convey our interior selves to our outer selves and beyond. That means that this course is about language, emotion (specifically, love), and the (re)presentation of the self and how these three foci are historically constructed but phenomenologically experienced.