The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience
-
Jonathan L. Ready
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.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents VII
- List of Figures IX
- Introduction XI
- Emotions, Memory, and the Wrath of Achilles: Observations from Cognitive Psychology 1
- The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience 21
- The Emotional Memories of Internal Narrators: Homer, Virgil, Ovid 45
- Religious Emotions and Mnemonic Discourses: The Gold Tablets of Memory 69
- Remembering Emotions 85
- Exploitation of (Alleged) Memories in Demosthenes and Aeschines 101
- Aristotle on Memory and Emotion in Human and Non-human Animals 129
- Emotive Memory Traces in Roman Literature 153
- Herodes Atticus, Material Memories, and the Expression and Reception of Grief 175
- Memory and Emotion in Philostratus’ Heroicus 203
- Nostalgia and Reading in Augustine’s Confessions 225
- List of Contributors 243
- Index Locorum 245
- Index Rerum 259
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents VII
- List of Figures IX
- Introduction XI
- Emotions, Memory, and the Wrath of Achilles: Observations from Cognitive Psychology 1
- The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience 21
- The Emotional Memories of Internal Narrators: Homer, Virgil, Ovid 45
- Religious Emotions and Mnemonic Discourses: The Gold Tablets of Memory 69
- Remembering Emotions 85
- Exploitation of (Alleged) Memories in Demosthenes and Aeschines 101
- Aristotle on Memory and Emotion in Human and Non-human Animals 129
- Emotive Memory Traces in Roman Literature 153
- Herodes Atticus, Material Memories, and the Expression and Reception of Grief 175
- Memory and Emotion in Philostratus’ Heroicus 203
- Nostalgia and Reading in Augustine’s Confessions 225
- List of Contributors 243
- Index Locorum 245
- Index Rerum 259
