Vinay Dharwadker - The Emotional Charge of Poetry

A comparative analysis of the classical Sanskrit Natyashastra and Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions uncovers a common atlas of emotions that human beings and animals express under various conditions. This discussion will explore ways to apply the Natyashastra-Darwin paradigm to select significant moments in the history of lyric in world literature. The specific goal will be to ask how poets actually represent the multifarious “emotional charge” of poetry (in several senses of the phrase) on a non-dualistic atlas of emotions—both before and after the mind-body split and outside its cultural regime, whether in Europe or the global South. More important, how do these poets transform the very history in which they are embedded?