Tragic Emotions in the Anthropocene. The Ethical Urgency of Rethinking Ancient and Modern Pity through Citizen Humanities

forthcoming

What role can emotions felt towards fictional characters, and specifically aroused from ancient drama, possibly play in the 21st century? In an era in which humans’ impact on the earth system leads us to rethink our social, economic, and cultural paradigms, scholars encourage new emotional practices as a contribution to new ways of interrelating with otherness, evoking a transition from the Anthropocene to the Compassionocene. Acknowledging pity as a specific emotional response to Greek tragedy according to Aristotle’s Poetics, TragEmA aims to investigate the relationship between Greek drama, emotional response to contemporary adaptations of ancient plays (i.e., pity and its cognate phenomena such as compassion, empathy, and sympathy) and their ethical impact on the Western world, by considering productions in the UK, France, Italy, and Germany. While scholars have mostly been focused on ancient spectators’ responses and the notion of narrative empathy, this project aims to go beyond the state of the art, applying to a neglected case study – Greek drama today – a new interdisciplinary approach: a comparative-historical approach will be combined with 4Ecognition tools and citizen humanities, opening a dialogue between classical reception, cognitive science, philosophy of emotions, and ethics. Investigating today’s response to Greek drama, TragEmA will explore the mechanisms of in- and exclusion in empathetic practices to define that kind of fellow-feeling that we urgently need to reshape as a contribution to the ethical debate on attention to alterity and diversity. Lastly, it aims to enhance the role of Classics within the European educational curricula as a privileged way to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Benefiting from the interdisciplinary environment of Lethica (Strasbourg) and the APGRD (Oxford), and from the expertise of my supervisor E. Zanin, this fellowship will impact my career and boost my knowledge of connecting Classical reception, ethics, and cognitive humanities.