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The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience

  • Jonathan L. Ready
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Memory and Emotions in Antiquity
This chapter is in the book Memory and Emotions in Antiquity

Abstract

This chapter considers why we can both know what will happen in a story and yet worry about what will happen. Building on research in media studies, communications, and psychology into emotional identification, I offer a close reading of Agamemnon’s aristeiain Iliad11 in which I point to opportunities for audience members to experience emotional identification with the Achaean leader. I then suggest one reason why we experience anxiety over the fate of a character even when we have it stored away in our memory that they will be fine: we have experienced emotional identification with them or are experiencing emotional identification with them at that very moment.

Abstract

This chapter considers why we can both know what will happen in a story and yet worry about what will happen. Building on research in media studies, communications, and psychology into emotional identification, I offer a close reading of Agamemnon’s aristeiain Iliad11 in which I point to opportunities for audience members to experience emotional identification with the Achaean leader. I then suggest one reason why we experience anxiety over the fate of a character even when we have it stored away in our memory that they will be fine: we have experienced emotional identification with them or are experiencing emotional identification with them at that very moment.

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Preface V
  3. Contents VII
  4. List of Figures IX
  5. Introduction XI
  6. Emotions, Memory, and the Wrath of Achilles: Observations from Cognitive Psychology 1
  7. The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience 21
  8. The Emotional Memories of Internal Narrators: Homer, Virgil, Ovid 45
  9. Religious Emotions and Mnemonic Discourses: The Gold Tablets of Memory 69
  10. Remembering Emotions 85
  11. Exploitation of (Alleged) Memories in Demosthenes and Aeschines 101
  12. Aristotle on Memory and Emotion in Human and Non-human Animals 129
  13. Emotive Memory Traces in Roman Literature 153
  14. Herodes Atticus, Material Memories, and the Expression and Reception of Grief 175
  15. Memory and Emotion in Philostratus’ Heroicus 203
  16. Nostalgia and Reading in Augustine’s Confessions 225
  17. List of Contributors 243
  18. Index Locorum 245
  19. Index Rerum 259
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111345246-002

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter I
  2. Preface V
  3. Contents VII
  4. List of Figures IX
  5. Introduction XI
  6. Emotions, Memory, and the Wrath of Achilles: Observations from Cognitive Psychology 1
  7. The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience 21
  8. The Emotional Memories of Internal Narrators: Homer, Virgil, Ovid 45
  9. Religious Emotions and Mnemonic Discourses: The Gold Tablets of Memory 69
  10. Remembering Emotions 85
  11. Exploitation of (Alleged) Memories in Demosthenes and Aeschines 101
  12. Aristotle on Memory and Emotion in Human and Non-human Animals 129
  13. Emotive Memory Traces in Roman Literature 153
  14. Herodes Atticus, Material Memories, and the Expression and Reception of Grief 175
  15. Memory and Emotion in Philostratus’ Heroicus 203
  16. Nostalgia and Reading in Augustine’s Confessions 225
  17. List of Contributors 243
  18. Index Locorum 245
  19. Index Rerum 259
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