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Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art
Deeper than Reason takes the insights of modern scientific research on the emotions and uses them to illuminate questions about our emotional involvement with the arts. Robinson begins by laying out a theory of emotion, one that is supported by the best evidence from current empirical work, and then in the light of this theory examines some of the ways in which the emotions function in the arts. Written in a clear and engaging style, her book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the emotions and how they work, as well as anyone engaged with the arts and aesthetics, especially with questions about emotional expression in the arts, emotional experience of art forms, and, more generally, artistic interpretation.
515 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 18, 2023
In the first fourth of the book, Robinson presents an informative (but I think incorrect) theory of emotion, and gives a helpful review of major experimental psychological literature on emotion. For the rest of the book, she applies her theory to explaining the role of emotion in our experiences of literature and music, which I think is misguided. But this first fourth of the book is excellent, and may be read as a stand-alone piece.
Robinson examines major philosophical and psychological theories of emotion, to then arrive at her own theory, over chapters 1-3. Robinson makes some good points. Her criticisms of these theories are often insightful. Unfortunately, she inherits an implicit assumption that shapes most contemporary philosophical literature on emotion, without making it explicit or questioning it. This is the assumption that emotion must fit into one of the traditional, mental ontological categories (e.g., feeling/sensation v. judgment/cognition). But why think that emotion must be a category of such a nature that it must have one of these two ontological natures over the other? Why can't emotion, instead, be something rather like a function of sensations and judgments, something that shapes or constrains mental activities of these categories? Her criticisms of these theories are often insightful. Unfortunately, she inherits an implicit assumption that shapes most contemporary philosophical literature on emotion, without making it explicit or questioning it.
She also makes very good points. Robinson shows that philosophers, who consider emotion to be appraisal or cognition-based, construe emotions as directed towards propositions. In contrast, experimental psychologists who consider emotion to be appraisal-based think of emotion as directed towards objects of the environment, regardless of whether it's an external or an internal environment (unfortunately there's no discussion about how psychologists conceive of an "internal" environment -- how do psychologists make sense of things that we remember or imagine as making up our world, where this is not understood in terms of propositions? What are alternative ways of conceiving of this?).
There are some philosophers who think emotion is appraisal-based, but in a way by which cognition is employed without making judgments. For example, Pat Greenspan understands the evaluative content of emotion in terms of "seeing-as". This explains how we can have conflicting emotions simultaneously; we have different facets of the self, or sets of values, which yield different evaluative perspectives and emotions. Robinson takes this approach overall; she goes into more detail of what it means for evaluative content to be truly non-cognitive, or not involving any conceptual content. She gets there through considering a couple of major theories in experimental psychology. Zajonc argues that emotional responsiveness is evolutionarily primitive and fundamentally consists in automatic fight or flight reactions, prior to any cognition or conscious registration. Lazarus distinguishes between conscious and automatic/unconscious appraisals; we have multiple emotion systems that interact with one another. Ledoux theorizes about the fear circuit; there are many, phylogenetically diverse animals that can be reflexively triggered by certain stimuli (with little or no environmental discrimination), which leads automatically to action. No cognition mediates this reflex.
Robinson proposes that what she calls a "non-cognitive appraisal" is necessary and sufficient for emotion. It is just that for humans, most of the time, we are consciously aware of the effects of this non-cognitive appraisal, and this awareness or monitoring often is the starting point for our making further cognitive appraisals, or our consciously making sense of what is happening to us. What is a non-cognitive appraisal? Robinson explains how it's difficult to conceptualize this, because it is inherently non-conceptual and non-linguistic. We may try to make sense of it functionally, in terms of some affective assessment of some situation along some primitive dimension or measure. Robinson reviews psychological literature that proposes different basic measures of affect, such as whether some situation is more or less pleasurable, conducive to our goals, preferable v. averse, something we are able vs. unable to cope with, places demands on effort and agency, etc.
Robinson acknowledges that we're almost always monitoring these automatic affective appraisals, and our conscious evaluations of these will modify the action tendencies that the affective appraisals trigger. Sometimes no matter how many reappraisals we make, the physiological symptoms of an initial affective appraisal persist. That's why we can still have an emotion after realizing that its initial foundation was illusory. It also seems plausible that nameable emotional states are relatively rare, and our emotional life occurs in streams that change all the time. What we can name is shaped by the emotion words of our culture, which is shaped by deeper cultural values and historical facts.
While I found Robinson's review of the empirical literature very helpful, her theory is critically problematic. First, she contradicts herself. She identifies emotion with a certain kind of appraisal (the non-cognitive sort she aims to define), and then also understands emotion to be a process, that almost always involves cognitive monitoring and assessment. The latter implies that emotion, in effect, necessarily involves cognitive appraisal, which stands in tension with her former claim. I think Robinson would do better with refraining from playing the analytical philosophy game of identifying emotion with a specific ontological category of those of related folk psychological categories. Instead, she could just lean into the fact that emotion is a process that necessarily involves our conscious awareness of what's happening.
Once understood in this manner, this implies that emotion necessarily involves perception. At any moment of conscious awareness, we're perceptually aware of at least our bodies and spatiotemporal location. Even if we're caught up in a flight of imagination, we're aware that we're imagining that fantasy world from the position of our bodies, which stand or sit or walk at some specific place. This, in turn, implies that emotions directed at fictional things cannot be the same as emotions directed at real life things -- this falsifies all of Robinson's claims in the remainder of the book. (Or here's an alternative path one could take, which also undermines Robinson's account; at the moment of initial affective or non-cognitive appraisal, such affective processes are nevertheless sensitive as to whether the stimuli to which we're reacting is part of reality or is merely imagined or made-up. In other words, whether something is sensed as real or not is deeper than cognition. Something may show up to us as real, and yet we cognize or believe that it is not - this seems plausible. Consider phobias.)
Robinson spends the remaining chapters (4-14) to showing how art (literature and then music) triggers our emotions, and teaches us how to emote in better ways. I think all of her discussion there is founded on this error. Robinson assumes that emotion can be based upon a non-cognitive appraisal alone, which can be triggered by fictional and real-life objects alike (in spite of her claims elsewhere that emotion always involves conscious monitoring of what's unfolding). So a gunfight that we read about in a novel can evoke fear, according to Robinson, in the same way by which witnessing a gunfight in real life does. If there are differences in behavioral consequences, this is because in reading the novel, we also cognitively assess that we're in a safe place, and this is just a story. For Robinson's claim to hold, she'd need an argument for why such an assessment does not integrate into and influence the emotion process triggered by the initial affect in such a way that the overall emotion is not properly fear, as we have it in real life. But no where does she argue for this.
(Also, in chapters 10-13, Robinson argues that instrumental music expresses real-life, garden variety emotions. This is ridiculous -- I rarely use such a strong term to assess philosophical positions I encounter, but I will use it here. How can anyone sincerely believe that? Of course music triggers all sorts of affect, or bodily sensations that we associate with real-life emotions. But that doesn't mean that music is about these emotions (e.g., music represents or conveys these emotions), or that the music itself has qualities that are shared with those emotions (which are implied by her definition of "expression"). Of course, one can get oneself to feel real-life emotions while listening to music, by thinking about past experiences or parts of the real world which make ourselves emotional. Also, of course, one can convince oneself that the music represents these real-life emotions. But different people listen to music for different reasons, and people who do not associate real-life emotions with the affective experiences of music are not wrong. There are many other qualities of music to focus on: its various formal features, for instance, and the history and culture surrounding it. I'd recommend any readers to skip this part of the book).
I think chapters 4-8 have some interesting bits. Unfortunately a lot of it is also problematic -- Robinson goes on and on about how certain formal literary devices alter emotion, but I think it's ad-hoc application of her theory of emotion. Her views on this issue boil down to this: Literary devices in fiction distract us from the real-life phenomenon dealt with, and let us bask in the beauty of the artwork; this makes us more willing to engage with this real-life phenomenon, since it feels less daunting, once we're flooded with these positive aesthetic enjoyments. But I think the more crucial reason why we can so enjoy a fictional depiction of something that'd be horrible in real life is that we register the fiction as fiction, and so don't have actual emotion towards it.
The interesting bits in those chapters includes the following. Robinson examines the emotional influences of literature. For the reasons I give above, I think she's wrong to say that apparent emotions directed at fictional characters and events are actual emotions. But she's right to say that there may be genuine affective components triggered by literature, components which may also be found integrated in the emotion processes that make up actual or real-life emotions.
It's crucial to recognize that these apparent emotions directed at fictions are not actual emotions. This opens the more interesting and messy questions: Given that we know that there's nothing real there before us, once we consciously notice and monitor the affect triggered in us, what do our minds tend to do? (Below is some off-the-cuff thinking about this matter. It's very tentative, and I owe it to Robinson to motivate me in this).
Often we respond by pretending that we feel emotion for the fictional character or event. We do this because it makes us feel more immersed in the fictional world, and we've been pretending so far that the contents are real; we're just continuing the game of pretense (cf. Kendall Walton). This pretending may influence the affective processes, but it cannot give rise to an actual emotion; we know that the fictional character is only fiction, not part of real life, and we cannot just voluntarily dupe ourselves otherwise. This opens another interesting and messy question, however: What are the repercussions of such knowledge? When we register something as make-believe, rather than as real, what does this do to us exactly, and what effects does this have on affective processes?
It also seems that in engaging with literature, once we know that there's nothing real there before us and consciously notice and monitor the affect triggered in us, our minds often leap into various symbolic or poetic associations between the content of the fiction and parts of real life. When I read about the "green freedom of the cockatoo" (Wallace Stevens) it feels like my mind brings up various feelings based in various places from life, which I cannot consciously individuate and list out, however. Sometimes the associations are more conscious and listable: I may notice myself associating Alyosha with a close friend who is uncannily similar to this fictional character. Once these associations are established, it seems that we can have all sorts of actual emotions, directed at these real-life things brought into awareness, (or at least lingering affective components of those) which stay in the background as we focus upon the fiction. This is not unlike how a scare in the morning might put us in a paranoid or fretful mood, which lingers on in the background as we focus on daily, non-fearful things.
I think this all opens a particularly interesting question: What sorts of emotional possibilities does engagement with fiction enable us to, which are closed off by engagement with real life? In real life we're immediately encountered by something pressing, so while we can draw associations (e.g., poetic associations) between it and other things, we tend not to do this as often, or if we do, our mind is more constrained in the associations it is capable of drawing, due to the urgency of the real circumstances we're within. But in art, our mind is freed to draw wider ranging associations, to pluck forth various real life emotions that react to those associations, and then to move on, so that only the affective components of those emotions linger on in the background. This is just a preliminary thought: there's surely much more that can be said about this thought, and many other thoughts to be had in response to this question.
Another way to finesse the question: What are the main commonalities and differences between apprehending something via text, image, or live-time perception? Does this question dramatically change if we qualify the ‘something’ as particularly real life v. make believe? For example, how should we compare these cases: (1) reading a newspaper article of a war that's currently happening, (2) reading a piece of historical fiction about a war, and (3) being in the midst of a war unfolding around you? (1) and (2) definitely have much overlap, but I'd imagine they are still different, where (1) and (3) also have certain overlap, which (2) and (3) do not have. In reading non-fiction, for example, our mind is still likely constrained in ways that don't enable as flexible and poetic of associations, as those enabled by engagement with fiction. This is likely because when we read non-fiction, in understanding that what we imagine is part of reality, of which our everyday lives are also a part, our real-life interests and concerns are activated; and these interests constrain the associations our minds can make.
Here's a more difficult edge-case though: compare reading about a celebrity’s life, and a fictional character. There’s more commonality here, likely because we think about celebrities already in symbolic and imaginative ways, while not caring about whether we're right about our assumptions, so that our imagined versions of these people may show up to us as part of real-life. But still I'd imagine there are differences, similar to those I name in the paragraph above.
(Other edge-cases to think about further: compare the employment of a metaphor in a piece of fiction v. in real-life, as in when we try to re-appraise a situation by using a metaphor to understand our situation, or when a politician uses a metaphor in as rhetoric in a speech. It seems that an effect of employing metaphor (e.g, a human life comes in terms of the four seasons of our natural world) in either real life or in fiction is to trouble inherited meanings or narratives, or the very definition of abstract things -- it invites us to think that there’s something mysterious going on. Another comparison: death as dealt with by a good poet, and then as dealt with by an ancient Epicurean text. Maybe this isn't too different from talking to someone who we know is telling us what they earnestly believe through rigorous thinking vs. talking to someone who we know is speaking simply because it sounds nice, but it also happens to reflect their views. But again I'd imagine there are differences, similar to those I name in the initial paragraph above.)
Robinson has an interesting hypothesis that experiences of fiction can alter our "emotional memory" (i.e., the emotions we have associated with specific things of experience), as real life situations do. I think that's correct, but think that the ways by which fictional v. real-life experiences alter our emotional memory differ. If fictional experiences do, I'd imagine it's by virtue of letting our minds bring forth and combine various memories of real-life things (associated with the fictional thing), and/or contextualize these real-life things under a new narrative or understanding, so that the next time we encounter relevant real-life things, new meanings of them, enabled by this narrative, inhere in them. In contrast, when real-life experiences alter our emotional memory, it is straightforwardly by conditioning us anew. This gives more detail to my tentative thought that engagement with fiction can uniquely enable our minds to understand real-life in new ways.
Robinson examines major philosophical and psychological theories of emotion, to then arrive at her own theory, over chapters 1-3. Robinson makes some good points. Her criticisms of these theories are often insightful. Unfortunately, she inherits an implicit assumption that shapes most contemporary philosophical literature on emotion, without making it explicit or questioning it. This is the assumption that emotion must fit into one of the traditional, mental ontological categories (e.g., feeling/sensation v. judgment/cognition). But why think that emotion must be a category of such a nature that it must have one of these two ontological natures over the other? Why can't emotion, instead, be something rather like a function of sensations and judgments, something that shapes or constrains mental activities of these categories? Her criticisms of these theories are often insightful. Unfortunately, she inherits an implicit assumption that shapes most contemporary philosophical literature on emotion, without making it explicit or questioning it.
She also makes very good points. Robinson shows that philosophers, who consider emotion to be appraisal or cognition-based, construe emotions as directed towards propositions. In contrast, experimental psychologists who consider emotion to be appraisal-based think of emotion as directed towards objects of the environment, regardless of whether it's an external or an internal environment (unfortunately there's no discussion about how psychologists conceive of an "internal" environment -- how do psychologists make sense of things that we remember or imagine as making up our world, where this is not understood in terms of propositions? What are alternative ways of conceiving of this?).
There are some philosophers who think emotion is appraisal-based, but in a way by which cognition is employed without making judgments. For example, Pat Greenspan understands the evaluative content of emotion in terms of "seeing-as". This explains how we can have conflicting emotions simultaneously; we have different facets of the self, or sets of values, which yield different evaluative perspectives and emotions. Robinson takes this approach overall; she goes into more detail of what it means for evaluative content to be truly non-cognitive, or not involving any conceptual content. She gets there through considering a couple of major theories in experimental psychology. Zajonc argues that emotional responsiveness is evolutionarily primitive and fundamentally consists in automatic fight or flight reactions, prior to any cognition or conscious registration. Lazarus distinguishes between conscious and automatic/unconscious appraisals; we have multiple emotion systems that interact with one another. Ledoux theorizes about the fear circuit; there are many, phylogenetically diverse animals that can be reflexively triggered by certain stimuli (with little or no environmental discrimination), which leads automatically to action. No cognition mediates this reflex.
Robinson proposes that what she calls a "non-cognitive appraisal" is necessary and sufficient for emotion. It is just that for humans, most of the time, we are consciously aware of the effects of this non-cognitive appraisal, and this awareness or monitoring often is the starting point for our making further cognitive appraisals, or our consciously making sense of what is happening to us. What is a non-cognitive appraisal? Robinson explains how it's difficult to conceptualize this, because it is inherently non-conceptual and non-linguistic. We may try to make sense of it functionally, in terms of some affective assessment of some situation along some primitive dimension or measure. Robinson reviews psychological literature that proposes different basic measures of affect, such as whether some situation is more or less pleasurable, conducive to our goals, preferable v. averse, something we are able vs. unable to cope with, places demands on effort and agency, etc.
Robinson acknowledges that we're almost always monitoring these automatic affective appraisals, and our conscious evaluations of these will modify the action tendencies that the affective appraisals trigger. Sometimes no matter how many reappraisals we make, the physiological symptoms of an initial affective appraisal persist. That's why we can still have an emotion after realizing that its initial foundation was illusory. It also seems plausible that nameable emotional states are relatively rare, and our emotional life occurs in streams that change all the time. What we can name is shaped by the emotion words of our culture, which is shaped by deeper cultural values and historical facts.
While I found Robinson's review of the empirical literature very helpful, her theory is critically problematic. First, she contradicts herself. She identifies emotion with a certain kind of appraisal (the non-cognitive sort she aims to define), and then also understands emotion to be a process, that almost always involves cognitive monitoring and assessment. The latter implies that emotion, in effect, necessarily involves cognitive appraisal, which stands in tension with her former claim. I think Robinson would do better with refraining from playing the analytical philosophy game of identifying emotion with a specific ontological category of those of related folk psychological categories. Instead, she could just lean into the fact that emotion is a process that necessarily involves our conscious awareness of what's happening.
Once understood in this manner, this implies that emotion necessarily involves perception. At any moment of conscious awareness, we're perceptually aware of at least our bodies and spatiotemporal location. Even if we're caught up in a flight of imagination, we're aware that we're imagining that fantasy world from the position of our bodies, which stand or sit or walk at some specific place. This, in turn, implies that emotions directed at fictional things cannot be the same as emotions directed at real life things -- this falsifies all of Robinson's claims in the remainder of the book. (Or here's an alternative path one could take, which also undermines Robinson's account; at the moment of initial affective or non-cognitive appraisal, such affective processes are nevertheless sensitive as to whether the stimuli to which we're reacting is part of reality or is merely imagined or made-up. In other words, whether something is sensed as real or not is deeper than cognition. Something may show up to us as real, and yet we cognize or believe that it is not - this seems plausible. Consider phobias.)
Robinson spends the remaining chapters (4-14) to showing how art (literature and then music) triggers our emotions, and teaches us how to emote in better ways. I think all of her discussion there is founded on this error. Robinson assumes that emotion can be based upon a non-cognitive appraisal alone, which can be triggered by fictional and real-life objects alike (in spite of her claims elsewhere that emotion always involves conscious monitoring of what's unfolding). So a gunfight that we read about in a novel can evoke fear, according to Robinson, in the same way by which witnessing a gunfight in real life does. If there are differences in behavioral consequences, this is because in reading the novel, we also cognitively assess that we're in a safe place, and this is just a story. For Robinson's claim to hold, she'd need an argument for why such an assessment does not integrate into and influence the emotion process triggered by the initial affect in such a way that the overall emotion is not properly fear, as we have it in real life. But no where does she argue for this.
(Also, in chapters 10-13, Robinson argues that instrumental music expresses real-life, garden variety emotions. This is ridiculous -- I rarely use such a strong term to assess philosophical positions I encounter, but I will use it here. How can anyone sincerely believe that? Of course music triggers all sorts of affect, or bodily sensations that we associate with real-life emotions. But that doesn't mean that music is about these emotions (e.g., music represents or conveys these emotions), or that the music itself has qualities that are shared with those emotions (which are implied by her definition of "expression"). Of course, one can get oneself to feel real-life emotions while listening to music, by thinking about past experiences or parts of the real world which make ourselves emotional. Also, of course, one can convince oneself that the music represents these real-life emotions. But different people listen to music for different reasons, and people who do not associate real-life emotions with the affective experiences of music are not wrong. There are many other qualities of music to focus on: its various formal features, for instance, and the history and culture surrounding it. I'd recommend any readers to skip this part of the book).
I think chapters 4-8 have some interesting bits. Unfortunately a lot of it is also problematic -- Robinson goes on and on about how certain formal literary devices alter emotion, but I think it's ad-hoc application of her theory of emotion. Her views on this issue boil down to this: Literary devices in fiction distract us from the real-life phenomenon dealt with, and let us bask in the beauty of the artwork; this makes us more willing to engage with this real-life phenomenon, since it feels less daunting, once we're flooded with these positive aesthetic enjoyments. But I think the more crucial reason why we can so enjoy a fictional depiction of something that'd be horrible in real life is that we register the fiction as fiction, and so don't have actual emotion towards it.
The interesting bits in those chapters includes the following. Robinson examines the emotional influences of literature. For the reasons I give above, I think she's wrong to say that apparent emotions directed at fictional characters and events are actual emotions. But she's right to say that there may be genuine affective components triggered by literature, components which may also be found integrated in the emotion processes that make up actual or real-life emotions.
It's crucial to recognize that these apparent emotions directed at fictions are not actual emotions. This opens the more interesting and messy questions: Given that we know that there's nothing real there before us, once we consciously notice and monitor the affect triggered in us, what do our minds tend to do? (Below is some off-the-cuff thinking about this matter. It's very tentative, and I owe it to Robinson to motivate me in this).
Often we respond by pretending that we feel emotion for the fictional character or event. We do this because it makes us feel more immersed in the fictional world, and we've been pretending so far that the contents are real; we're just continuing the game of pretense (cf. Kendall Walton). This pretending may influence the affective processes, but it cannot give rise to an actual emotion; we know that the fictional character is only fiction, not part of real life, and we cannot just voluntarily dupe ourselves otherwise. This opens another interesting and messy question, however: What are the repercussions of such knowledge? When we register something as make-believe, rather than as real, what does this do to us exactly, and what effects does this have on affective processes?
It also seems that in engaging with literature, once we know that there's nothing real there before us and consciously notice and monitor the affect triggered in us, our minds often leap into various symbolic or poetic associations between the content of the fiction and parts of real life. When I read about the "green freedom of the cockatoo" (Wallace Stevens) it feels like my mind brings up various feelings based in various places from life, which I cannot consciously individuate and list out, however. Sometimes the associations are more conscious and listable: I may notice myself associating Alyosha with a close friend who is uncannily similar to this fictional character. Once these associations are established, it seems that we can have all sorts of actual emotions, directed at these real-life things brought into awareness, (or at least lingering affective components of those) which stay in the background as we focus upon the fiction. This is not unlike how a scare in the morning might put us in a paranoid or fretful mood, which lingers on in the background as we focus on daily, non-fearful things.
I think this all opens a particularly interesting question: What sorts of emotional possibilities does engagement with fiction enable us to, which are closed off by engagement with real life? In real life we're immediately encountered by something pressing, so while we can draw associations (e.g., poetic associations) between it and other things, we tend not to do this as often, or if we do, our mind is more constrained in the associations it is capable of drawing, due to the urgency of the real circumstances we're within. But in art, our mind is freed to draw wider ranging associations, to pluck forth various real life emotions that react to those associations, and then to move on, so that only the affective components of those emotions linger on in the background. This is just a preliminary thought: there's surely much more that can be said about this thought, and many other thoughts to be had in response to this question.
Another way to finesse the question: What are the main commonalities and differences between apprehending something via text, image, or live-time perception? Does this question dramatically change if we qualify the ‘something’ as particularly real life v. make believe? For example, how should we compare these cases: (1) reading a newspaper article of a war that's currently happening, (2) reading a piece of historical fiction about a war, and (3) being in the midst of a war unfolding around you? (1) and (2) definitely have much overlap, but I'd imagine they are still different, where (1) and (3) also have certain overlap, which (2) and (3) do not have. In reading non-fiction, for example, our mind is still likely constrained in ways that don't enable as flexible and poetic of associations, as those enabled by engagement with fiction. This is likely because when we read non-fiction, in understanding that what we imagine is part of reality, of which our everyday lives are also a part, our real-life interests and concerns are activated; and these interests constrain the associations our minds can make.
Here's a more difficult edge-case though: compare reading about a celebrity’s life, and a fictional character. There’s more commonality here, likely because we think about celebrities already in symbolic and imaginative ways, while not caring about whether we're right about our assumptions, so that our imagined versions of these people may show up to us as part of real-life. But still I'd imagine there are differences, similar to those I name in the paragraph above.
(Other edge-cases to think about further: compare the employment of a metaphor in a piece of fiction v. in real-life, as in when we try to re-appraise a situation by using a metaphor to understand our situation, or when a politician uses a metaphor in as rhetoric in a speech. It seems that an effect of employing metaphor (e.g, a human life comes in terms of the four seasons of our natural world) in either real life or in fiction is to trouble inherited meanings or narratives, or the very definition of abstract things -- it invites us to think that there’s something mysterious going on. Another comparison: death as dealt with by a good poet, and then as dealt with by an ancient Epicurean text. Maybe this isn't too different from talking to someone who we know is telling us what they earnestly believe through rigorous thinking vs. talking to someone who we know is speaking simply because it sounds nice, but it also happens to reflect their views. But again I'd imagine there are differences, similar to those I name in the initial paragraph above.)
Robinson has an interesting hypothesis that experiences of fiction can alter our "emotional memory" (i.e., the emotions we have associated with specific things of experience), as real life situations do. I think that's correct, but think that the ways by which fictional v. real-life experiences alter our emotional memory differ. If fictional experiences do, I'd imagine it's by virtue of letting our minds bring forth and combine various memories of real-life things (associated with the fictional thing), and/or contextualize these real-life things under a new narrative or understanding, so that the next time we encounter relevant real-life things, new meanings of them, enabled by this narrative, inhere in them. In contrast, when real-life experiences alter our emotional memory, it is straightforwardly by conditioning us anew. This gives more detail to my tentative thought that engagement with fiction can uniquely enable our minds to understand real-life in new ways.
January 2, 2024
This is really four books in one. I. An account of emotion. II. A discussion of emotion and the literary arts. III. The Theory of Art as Expression of Emotion. IV. A discussion of music and emotion. I carefully read I-III and was impressed and convinced by Robinson's profound and acute insights. I'm not as interested in IV, but given how accessible and persuasive she was in the other parts of the book, I will probably read her discussion of music as well
June 18, 2009
Robinson is a rather simple reader of classic canonical texts in the arts. And yet.. she brings back much needlessly ignored essentials: matters like plot, character, and psychology, and moreover how emotional response is essential to getting art right. One of the better attempts to blend science and aesthetics. I adamantly disagree with her strong representational programmatic approach to music but it is an improvement and corrective to overtly formalistic and structural accounts of musical effects. She is best on the novel and provides a good overview on basics of emotion and latest research. A must for everyone who cares about literature and our brains.
July 19, 2012
Waited to purchase this until it became a bargain, and I'm glad I did.
The actual analyses that constitute the bulk of the book were, to my mind, simultaneously thin and tendentious. Given what was presented in the introductory chapters, on the nature and role of emotion in the arts, one expects more and specifically more on the visual nature of emotional experience.
Not as impressive a performance as suggested by the title...
The actual analyses that constitute the bulk of the book were, to my mind, simultaneously thin and tendentious. Given what was presented in the introductory chapters, on the nature and role of emotion in the arts, one expects more and specifically more on the visual nature of emotional experience.
Not as impressive a performance as suggested by the title...
July 27, 2009
Bravo!!! Summarizes current research and thought on emotion and how it works in fiction. Also makes the case for why you cannot understand many types of fiction without discussing emotion.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews