Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought

Ed. Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and Boston 2014.

• Neil Saccamano

In this recent volume from De Gruyter’s series on Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber have collected a set of compelling and provocative essays that range across literary, media, and film studies, art history, philosophy, and cognitive science and that contribute to the renewed interest in emotions, feelings, and passions in these and other disciplines. As the editors indicate in their introduction, the volume engages critically with a number of approaches to emotion that are currently prevalent, especially the history of emotions and what has been branded Affect Theory, with the aim of marking their limits by situating them in a historical arc that stretches from Aristotle to contemporary empirical research on perception and affect.