Poetry, drama and the novel present readers and viewers with emotionally significant situations that they often experience as moving, and their being so moved is one of the principal motivations for engaging with fictions. If emotions are considered as action-prompting beliefs about the environment, the appetite for sad or frightening drama and literature is difficult to explain, insofar nothing tragic or frightening is actually happening to the reader, and people do not normally enjoy being sad or frightened. The paper argues (...) that the somewhat limited and problematic epistemological framework for dealing with the question of fiction-induced emotions has been enhanced by a better empirical understanding of the role of the emotions in social animals and in our individual hedonic economies, as well as by a more generous philosophical assessment of what counts as ‘real’. Literary works can be understood further as monuments to experiences of loss that memorialize the highly pleasurable attachments associated with them. (shrink)

Robert Solomon criticized the philosophy of death for abstracting from human reality to treat our mortality as a collection of metaphysical puzzles. Nowhere is death less abstract than in our response to the death of our loved ones. The public face of our response is the memorial service and the eulogies that move us. Our experience of a eulogy can be as cathartic as Aristotle theorized as part of great tragedy. However, treating the oration as a work of art seems (...) inappropriate; seeking to understand our engagement in aesthetic terms disrespectful to the grieving. This paper attempts to resolve this paradox by exploring analogies between the structures of eulogies and those of tragedy, and showing that, rather than traditional aesthetics' "promise of happiness," our engagement is concerned with the "promise of meaning." Psychological research on the nature of empathy theorizes that humans are hard-wired to feel the experiences of others and this is undoubtedly at work in our emotional responses to literature and eulogies. Drawing on the work of Dacher Keltner, the paper argues that the key to the aesthetics of eulogies and literature lies in their power to invoke our "awe" in response to their words. (shrink)