A Poetics of Emotions. The Roots of the Affective Turn in the German Literature of the Late Eighteenth Century

In the last decades the so-called Affective Turn has interested the cognitive sciences but also reached very different areas such as that of the Humanities, shedding light on new interpretative and research perspectives in literature as well: emotions are in fact at the basis of literary expression and at the same time they are the key to the study of phenomena related to the reception of the text, thus becoming a meeting point between author and reader, between fictional and real world, between human and hard sciences. Therefore, following the most recent stimuli coming from the very fruitful dialogue between Neurohumanities and German literary studies and crossing the boundary drawn by the 19th century philosophical theories of Charles Darwin, William James and John Dewey, the present contribution aims to look even further back in time in order to demonstrate how the roots of the contemporary neurocognitive studies on emotions can be traced back to the German literature of the late eighteenth century. Indeed, the authors of the Sturm und Drang have not only explicitly spoken about emotions – Gefühl; Affekt – in their texts, but have also properly anticipated contemporary neurocognitive theories by grasping the connection between mind and body, between emotion and cognition anticipating in this way the current theory of embodiment. Their texts offer in this sense a new literary perspective on emotion studies to be combined with contemporary philosophical and neurocognitive theories. Addressing the issue of emotions from a historical-literary point of view, contemporary theories will therefore be compared with some selected texts by authors such as Herder, Goethe and Lenz in order to highlight how the German literary anthropology of the late 18th century can be considered the poetic cradle of that Affective Turn that today stimulates an intense and promising interdisciplinary dialogue.