142138 BA Emotions in South Asian Literature and Film: Approaches in Cultural Studies (2023S)

Emotions impact the way humans experience the world; they play an important role in the process through which individuals and social groups endow their experiences with meaning; and they are important in providing the motivation to act in the world. In this seminar, we will be putting emotions at the centre stage in South Asian studies thereby critically reflecting on the categories we are researching: Instead of assuming that we already know what love, anger, or fear is and hence can use them to explain interactions and developments, the categories themselves have become open to inquiry.
In this seminar, we will use examples from Hindi and English literature as well as Indian films to explore the wide range of emotions as they are depicted in literature and cinema. We will not only use these primary sources in Hindi but also the academic literature to investigate our topic, but we will also together discuss the artistic engagement of writers and filmmakers with how emotions are experienced, communicated and represented in these two medias across different registers and genres. Additionally, we will use the work of anthropologists, sociolinguists, media and political theorists to immerse ourselves in the complex contexts in which emotions intersect with other important issues of the human experience.
The seminar thus consists of two focal points: on the one hand with film and literary studies approaches that deal with materials in Hindi, and secondly, a cultural studies critique that deals with the cultural, social and historical contexts of these works.