The Plot Thickens - or Not: Protonarratives of Emotions and the Principle of Savoring
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/ths.2008.019Keywords
narrative, protonarrative, endocept, aesthetic savoring, emotional creativity, emotion as “way station” to actionAbstract
What are emotions good for? This paper makes the radical claim that for creative individuals at least emotional experiences may serve a similar function that Levi-Strauss attributes to death-it is “good for thought.” This claim challenges the prevalent notion of emotion as “action readiness,” and extends the hypothesis of emotion as “way station.” To demonstrate the “way station” function of emotion, I give a phenomenological account of “protonarratives” of emotions. Protonarratives of emotions are “small stories” that are saturated with nuanced feeling tones. As such, protonarratives are more creative than full fledged narratives of emotions, partly because of their successful resistance against the latter’s telos. By keeping the narrative impulses to the minimum, and by resisting the temptation of the plot to “thicken,” protonarratives of emotions reduce our risk of submitting to compulsory outcomes of the narrative. For illustration, a classical Chinese poem along with the Chinese notion of aesthetic savoring are examined. This phenomenological analysis concludes with a discussion of the implications of the phenomena for creativity and theories of emotions.References
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