You are warmly invited to join us on Thursday 13th March, when Dr Carolyn
Burdett will be addressing our Seminar with her paper entitled:
"Shareability and contagion: psychology and aesthetics at the fin de
siecle"
*As part of our series of seminars on Science and Literature, this event is
taking place in UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology
<http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology>.*
Directions to this building can be found
here<http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology/visit>
Dr Burdett's paper will be followed by questions and discussion, and the
meeting will conclude with a glass of wine at 7:30pm. A précis and speaker
profile are appended below for your interest.
*"Shareability and contagion: psychology and aesthetics at the fin de
siecle"*
Over the final three decades of the nineteenth century a growing interest
is discernible amongst psychologists in the category of aesthetics. One
strand of psychological argument attempted to restate in modern terms the
quality of art's 'shareability': emotions elicited by art and literature
could be shared, freeing humans from the 'monopolistic' nature of much of
life's struggle. At the end of the century, however, shared emotions were
also the focus of theories of crowds where feelings are not just shared but
caught, contagiously and dangerously. This paper suggests that aesthetic
sharing and contagious feeling are both of relevance to an increased
pressure being brought to bear by the end of the century on the notion of
sympathy - that capacity to share in others' feelings that composed a core
ethical gesture for the Victorians and was central to much of their
literary effort. Using the work of the aesthetic theorist, Vernon Lee, it
looks beyond the end of the century to Lee's response to crowd theory and
the value of aesthetics during World War 1 and her attempt to re-energise
sympathy and replace imitative contagion by the concept of empathy.
*Dr Carolyn Burdett* is senior lecturer in literature and Victorian studies
at Birkbeck, University of London. She was recently awarded a Leverhulme
research fellowship to pursue research on her current monograph, *Coining
Empathy: Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics, 1870-1920*.
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*Dr Elinor Shaffer, FBA*
Research Director, The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe
Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR),
University of London
http://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae/RRSS-2013-2014.htm
Supported by* Prof Timothy Mathews*, Professor of French and Comparative
Criticism, Vice-Dean Research Arts and Humanities, UCL
<http://www.ucl.ac.uk/multidisciplinary-and-intercultural-inquiry/reading-and-reception-seminars>
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/multidisciplinary-and-intercultural-inquiry/reading-and-reception-seminars
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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