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Genres as emotions

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Rottweiler Dog and Pony Show from Portland, Oregon Since: Dec, 2009
Dog and Pony Show
#1: Nov 9th 2011 at 4:42:58 AM

Traditional Indian aesthetics recognizes eight types of drama, divided by their dominant emotions. These rasas are love, pity, anger, disgust, heroism, awe, terror, and humor.

Is such a system useful for understanding Western fiction too?

  1. Tragedy is designed to evoke "fear and pity" for the protagonist.
  2. Comedy is designed to make us laugh.
  3. Romance (modern sense) is a genre designed to stimulate feelings of love.
  4. Adventure fiction (i.e. Dumas, Westerns, et al) evokes heroic excitement. Its precursor is romance (medieval & early modern sense), though there love was also crucial. "Fantasy novel" is a modern synonym for romance in the old sense (down to the medieval setting with magic).
  5. Horror evokes terror, of course.
  6. Some science fiction is designed to evoke awe ("sensawunda").

Is the mystery genre a problem for this scheme? Is the essential pleasure the logic puzzle (and thus no emotion at all), or fearful suspense?

Other issues?

“Love is the eternal law whereby the universe was created and is ruled.” — St. Bernard
Morven Nemesis from Seattle, WA, USA Since: Jan, 2001
Nemesis
#2: Nov 9th 2011 at 5:09:45 AM

The classical definition of "mystery" is about the logic puzzle, though obviously other stuff is added to flavor the narrative.

I think you're partially onto something, but I don't think genres as currently defined match that idea of genres exactly.

Science Fiction and Fantasy are both theoretically all-encompassing in terms of emotional genre (you could write a science-fiction mystery, a science-fiction horror, etc etc) but in practice they tend to center around a few. Awe is one, yes.

A brighter future for a darker age.
JHM Apparition in the Woods from Niemandswasser Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: Hounds of love are hunting
Leradny Since: Jan, 2001
#4: Nov 9th 2011 at 8:11:46 PM

RE title: Redundancy Department of Redundancy, for the most part. It obviously won't work for genres which describe settings (sci-fi, fantasy, western, Regency, surrealist) rather than tones (humor, romance, drama, horror).

CountSpatula Possible Stomatopod from Oh, some lunar colony Since: Jan, 2001 Relationship Status: Mu
Possible Stomatopod
#5: Nov 10th 2011 at 12:00:22 PM

You could consider the defining emotion of Mystery to be Curiosity, which is not on this list, though by all accounts, I don't see why it shouldn't be.

edited 10th Nov '11 12:00:44 PM by CountSpatula

I draws things. And I seem to be some sort of marine entity.
feotakahari Fuzzy Orange Doomsayer from Looking out at the city Since: Sep, 2009
Fuzzy Orange Doomsayer
#6: Nov 13th 2011 at 2:56:41 PM

I think some of the best fiction is designed to evoke moral discomfort, presenting two options that both have bad outcomes, and encouraging the reader to decide which one's better and which one's worse, without ever outright stating which choice the author believes is right. I don't know of a better term than "moral discomfort" to describe the emotion in question, but I don't think it fits into any of the given categories.

edited 13th Nov '11 2:57:07 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful
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