Stimmung und Methode

During the last 20 years, emotions have become a central subject of scholarly research. One of the most fascinating phenomena pertaining to emotions is the mood,a category, which is relevant in almost all the disciplines but difficult to define. Unlike feelings and affects, moods last longer, are experienced more often and do not have a concrete relation to an object. Moods are said to create a rather vague background for our daily experiences, and those are set apart from these so to speak as a »figure.« In the theory of music, this toning can be obtained by tempering and in painting it can be obtained by dissolving the picture's foreground. Moods have been observed in poetry since the Romantic period as a central form of modern subjectivity. This volume is a collection of essays focusing on the concept of mood in various areas such as aesthetics, poetics, philosophy, the psychology of emotions, musicology and new phenomenology.