CALL FOR PAPERS

We take great pleasure in announcing the Conference Aesthetics of Emotional Restraint,

organized by the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon,
and to be held in the Faculty of Letters in November 6
th
-7
th
, 2014.

Modernism is the culmination of a process that became gradually visible along the several moments of
deconstruction of the romantic aesthetics and ideas. The empathy and appealing rhetoric which were
typical of Romanticism became during the 19th century the target of deliberate strategies designed to
control and even to eliminate them, giving way to attitudes of coldness and emotional distance. These
aesthetic discourses evolved towards modes of communication based on shock, aggressiveness, disgust and
distance and are still in progress by experimentation and development in postmodern aesthetics.
Contemporary literature and arts present a complex and multifarious panorama, in which the expression
and representation of emotions take place in many different ways. If, however, there are examples of
exaltation and excess, there also remains the tendency to maintain the cold gaze and the reduction of
emotionality. These attitudes are mainly present in trauma narratives and in fictions in which the main
characters are defined by expertise and technical mastery. The same happens in the representation of

Departamento de
Estudos Germansticos
absurd situations, in the use of narration/reading as a game, in the refusal of subjectivity and in the use of
irony and of strategies of a fragmented focalization. The evolution in the media and especially in science
and technology supports this tendency, turning literature and the arts into privileged sites for second order
observation. This allows for the stressing of its cognitive capacity and the cooling down of its emotional and
empathic effects.
It is now necessary to identify, analyze and describe the rhetoric models that were progressively
introduced in order to cool down the specific languages of the different arts, which brought about a
change in the understanding of the relationship between the artistic objects, their authors, and the public.

Keynote Speakers:
Martin von Koppenfels ( Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitt, Munich)
Gregory Currie (University of York)
Helmut Lethen (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna)
Helena Buescu (Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, University of Lisbon)

Speakers should be prepared for a 20-minute presentation followed by questions. Please send a 250-word
abstract, as well as a brief biographical note (100 words) by April 30
th
2014, to: aestheticsofemotion@fl.ul.pt

Panel proposals should be presented before March 28
th.
Proposals should list paper title, name, institutional affiliation, and contact details.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
Aesthetics of coldness
Economy of emotion in literature and the arts
Memory of Emotions
Emotional restraint and empathy
Melancholy and emotional restraint
Engendered emotions
Ethics and emotions
Emotions and oppression
Politics and emotional manipulation
Aesthetics of trauma
Re-mediating emotions
Figurations of psychopathology
Coldness and the sublime
Emotions in cyborgs and machines
Conference fees:
Paper presentation (With certificate) : 75
Participation (With certificate): 25.
Students/ Paper presentation (With certificate) : 25
Students/ Participation (With certificate) : 10