Abstract: This study examines the experience of stirring up emotion in reaction to fiction. Contemporary theoreticians call this experience narrative emotion, while philosophers traditionally use the expression aesthetic emotion.1 Unlike most of the existing literature on the topic, my research takes a phenomenological approach to studying narrative/aesthetic emotion. The purpose of my investigation is to target the essence of narrative emotion, to list its components so as to develop a functional understanding of what philosophers refer to as 'aesthetic emotion'. This may lead us to a better understanding of the cultural and psychological need for fiction. In the field of philosophy, the interest in aesthetic emotion arose very recently. It is only with the advent of modern aesthetics that emotion could be valued as a proper object of study. In the first part of this analysis I expose how the empiricists' influence in the seventeenth century has lead to a viable study of aesthetics. Still, studying aesthetics and studying aesthetic emotions are two different things. Philosophy has a strong tradition of rational approaches, which does not leave much room for emotion. It is only since the 1970s that contemporary philosophers have started to address aesthetic emotion. And, since the late 1980s, philosophers who have had interest in aesthetic emotion actually focused obtusely on logic. In fact, currently the little written on the topic of aesthetic emotion relates to a logical conundrum, the paradox that fictional stimuli produce real
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 11
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