Impartido por Dragos Ivana (University of Bucharest) y organizado por el Departamento de Filología Española, Moderna y Clásica 

Edifici Ramon Llull, Sala de Graus

La investigadora Dragoş Ivana de la University of Bucharest nos ofrece su seminario sobre literatura organizado por el Departamento de Filología Española, Moderna y clásica. Seguidamente tenéis una descripción del mismo.

For liberal and charitable purposes, the sentimental novel in mid-eighteenth-century England witnessed a paradigmatic shift from the Good-Natured Man to the problematic Man of Sensibility, whose moral epistemology translates feeling per se as virtue. Concurrently, the language of Shaftesburean benevolence rooted in precepts set down by the Latitudinarian Divines was replaced by the language of the heart resulting both from ‘the change in the base of morality in mid-eighteenth century sentimental ethics’ and ‘the change in the connotations of the term “sentimental” from morality to feeling’. With this pithy remark, Sheriff has set the premises for an approach seeking to unravel the Man of Feeling as a degenerated, effeminate and pathetic individual, rather than a complement of the Good-Natured Man.
This seminar aims to explore the complementary relationship between the two types of protagonists by focusing on four major issues: a) the early eighteenth-century civic humanist tradition of the publicus – the liberal man whose leisure (property or the possession of land) enables him to get involved in the fulfilment of the common good; b) descriptive-explanatory and the moral-normative accounts of the Man of Feeling’s workings of the mind relevant to the ethics of relations; c) the particular focus on the concept of ‘sympathy’ seen as a bridge between the natural-philosophical and the moral domains, as a buffer between sense and intellect, between sensation and judgement; d) the Man of Feeling’s presupposed principled feeling critiqued as effeminate pathetic fallacy occasioned by excessive lament, unconditional suffering for others and tears as a mark of sentiment shed against a backdrop characterised by the collapse of heroic virtù and the emergence of the anti-aristocratic heroism of economic man.
I shall mount my argument by concentrating on two novels that are indicative of what I call the ‘extremes’ of the Man of Feeling: Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744), in which the emergent sentimental hero applies the mechanics of sympathy in a productive way and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), in which the eponymous hero Harley is a passive observer of life driven by virtual forms of sympathy.

Event date: 21/04/2016

Publication date: Tue Jul 12 15:34:00 CEST 2016