Eleven Theses on Literature and Emotion

Eric Sandberg’ article “Eleven Theses on Literature and Emotion” takes its form—and its inspiration—from Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, “two of the most concise and stimulating pages within [his] entire corpus” (Loftus 158). This means that rather than presenting a singular primary claim at the outset, and demonstrating its validity through evidence and argumentation, it offers eleven separate theses centring on and around the intersection of literature, teaching, and emotion. Taken as a whole, these claims both gradually develop a claim about the primacy of emotion in literary education, and explore a broader set of interrelated ideas about what we teach in the university literature classroom, why and how we teach it, and the role that emotion plays in those processes.