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The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre
- The Eighteenth Century
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2012
- pp. 432-454
- 10.1353/ecy.2012.0039
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article demonstrates the debt of eighteenth-century theories of theatrical emotion to classical, Scholastic, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophies of the passions. An understanding of emotion as a literal movement of the human soul is traced across the philosophy of René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche, the aesthetics of Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and the acting theory of Pierre Rémond de Sainte-Albine and Denis Diderot. The kinetic-kinesthetic epistemologies of emotion contained in these texts, it is argued, ought to provoke renewed attention to the vicarious experience of affect within contemporary performance scholarship.