Dreams we learn: Affect theory, genre, and the example of tragedy

This dissertation deploys Silvan Solomon Tomkins' affect and script theories to draw out consistent, significant, but largely unacknowledged emotional content in tragedy. It also serves as an introduction to and first installment in a larger study of emotional consistencies in three additional types of foundational narrative structures---comedy, romance, and irony-satire---or what Northrop Frye calls the "pregeneric" (AC 162) myths. The introduction considers possible correlations between literary protagonists and genre, and suggests why the study of fictional personalities and their emotional experiences can inform our ability to describe generic categories. It includes an overview of Tomkins' relationship to both traditional psychoanalysis and theories of human motivation and emotion. Chapter two is a comprehensive introduction to the major concepts of Tomkins' affect and script theories, and his terminology. I propose an alignment of key Tomkins ideas with Frye's pregeneric myths to create, heuristically, a hermeneutical model based on the emotional content of the four genres. Chapter three narrows the focus of analysis on to tragedy, and thus sets the final theoretical conditions for the application of Tomkins' theories in three case studies. In particular, disgust and contamination scripts are proposed as ubiquitous but largely underrated emotional experiences in tragedy. Case study one brings Tomkins' concepts to bear on Sophocles' Oedipus: I discover that Oedipus personality inexorably leads to his downfall and rejection as both a social- and self-disgusting object via disgust-contamination scripts due to the intrusion of abject humiliation. Case study two analyses Shakespeare's Hamlet: Hamlet is an acute depressive who combines shame and disgust in a monopolistic-contamination script, and as his feelings of self-disgust about his inaction becomes increasingly toxic, shame intrudes at a critical moment to catalyse decontaminating action. Case study three focusses on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: Willy and Biff Loman's mutually reflected (self-)disgust and contamination as mediated by damage-reparation scripts of shame.