“Thoughts on Feelings” – the podcast of the research training group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics.” In short interviews with guest researchers and members of our group we discuss our current research, personal encounters with the sentimental, favorite melodramas, and more.

Our research examines forms and functions of the sentimental in synchronic and diachronic perspectives. We conceive of the sentimental as a communicative and relational code which can draw on emotional knowledge and activate empathy. This code can be observed and studied in different fields of symbolic interaction, i.e. aesthetic-literary, politico-rhetorical, medially staged and as part of socially effective discourses and practices. With a comparative perspective, the research training group focuses both on culturally specific uses and on inter- and transcultural processes of appropriation of this code in national and transnational contexts. The sentimental unfolds its power as aesthetic mode of representation and as sociopolitical strategy of interpellation in literary and non-literary texts, as a means of cultural crisis- and contingency-management, and as a strategy of political mobilization, for example in protest movements and populist rhetoric. Our research question is of utmost relevance: the often-proclaimed crisis of political communication and its new sentimentality (not only) in Western democracies as well as the long history of the use of sentimental registers in generating empathy and solidarity in the face of individual and collective suffering attest to this.

Find out more about members, research projects, and publications on our website: www.sentimental.phil.fau.de.