Historicising Emotion in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips
Abstract
This article deals with the historical dimension of Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River from the point of view of the representation of emotion. Starting from the idea expressed by historians like Alain Corbin and Arlette Farge that it is difficult to represent emotions from the past, the article uses William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions as a frame for attempting to go beyond the apparent contradiction between a universalist view of emotion and a constructivist one which sees emotions as specific to cultures. On the basis of Reddy’s use of the term “emotives” to characterize speech acts which are performative in the sense that they are both “self-exploring” and “self-altering”, the article examines the way in which Phillips’s characters navigate between personal feelings and the “strict emotional regime” of slavery.
Domains
Literature
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
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