Feeling Fictions: How Stories Express Emotions

Emotional engagement with fictions has become a central field of study as it opens up new avenues for analyses. While we are all drawn emotionally to stories, actively discussing and analyzing these processes have largely been left unasked and unanswered. Yet seriously engaging with how fictions express emotions and how audiences react emotionally to these fictions allow for different discussions than what fictions mean. In this way, analyzing fictional feelings can activate students in a different manner than what they are used to.

This three-hour session will provide a theoretical framework for narrative emotions but more importantly provide concrete, hands-on analyses of various fictions (short stories, novels, films, and tv shows). The emphasis will be on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Zadie Smith’s “Grand Union,” Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry 2004), and Adolescence (Netflix 2025). This session opens up for a new way of engaging with fictions in class.