Movement and Feeling

This seminar explores a deep imaginative connection between motion and emotion. The reading list places autobiographical, fictional, and poetic accounts of physical movement through the world alongside literary and philosophical treatments of sympathetic feeling for other people in that world. The course starts with a hypothesis. It proposes that travel and sympathy are structurally interrelated, each producing the other. The literary scripts for journeying to new places are also guides for developing an expanded repertoire of emotion, and the literary scripts for becoming a deeply feeling person double as travelogues or quest narratives.

To test this hypothesis, we’ll focus on writings from the eighteenth century, a period when sympathy took shape as a serious philosophical subject and when, as the British Empire expanded, Britons and people in contact with them encountered new forms of mobility. Sometimes movement was freely chosen, as in travel undertaken for leisure or self-discovery, but much of the time it was mandated by hardship or violence. The laboring classes at home found themselves increasingly displaced and itinerant while millions of African people abroad were enslaved and forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean. It was in the eighteenth century, in fact, that Britain became the biggest slaving nation in the world, even as its thinkers were preoccupied with a new vocabulary of sentiment and the social virtue of politeness.

Racialization, the complex process in which categories of racial difference emerge and are activated, will be a recurring theme in our seminar. In several of our texts, to be a racialized body is to be a body on the move, but it’s also to be a faraway body, in transit from one distant place to another. For British writers, racialized bodies could either invite imaginative sympathy from afar or test sympathy’s geographical limits. Some Black authors, as we’ll see, picked up on this dynamic and creatively reworked it. The course culminates in the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved Black British abolitionist. Equiano suggests that his own history of physical and spiritual movement allows him to feel more deeply and more widely than his white readership can.