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Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyashāstra, Darwin, and Affect Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Vinay Dharwadker
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Abstract

A work of classical Indian theory and practice, Bharata's Nāṭyashāstra offers a comprehensive account of emotion and of the production, communication, and reception of representations of it in dance, music, poetry, and theater. This essay examines remarkable points of convergence and divergence between the third-century Sanskrit text and three influential modern Euro-American accounts: Charles Darwin's mapping of involuntary expressions of emotion in human beings and animals, William James's aggregation of emotions in the stream of consciousness, and Sylvan Tomkins's atlas of primary affects that links neurobiology and cybernetics. My comparative analysis highlights the Nāṭyashāstra's contributions to our understanding of the connections of emotion to cognition, consciousness, and causality; of the combinatorial constitution of emotions; and of treatments of emotion in contemporary affect theory and performance theory. The essay concludes with an exploration of Bharata's and Aristotle's models of mimesis and of their mutual differences regarding the representation of emotion in the verbal and performing arts.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1381 - 1404
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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