Die Kodierung von Emotionen in Ogawa Yōkos Werken und deren affektives und gefühlsbezogenes Wirkungspotential

Abstract

The present article investigates in what way emotions are encoded in the works of Ogawa Yōko and reveals how their affective and feeling-oriented impact potential unfolds. It argues that emotions predominantly occur in their pre-reflective form, i.e. as affects that are expressed by sensory narration. The study demonstrates that protagonists cannot verbalize and thematize reflected forms of emotions, i.e. feelings, or they stop at the affective level, primarily at the perception of physiological reactions. Sensory narration is embedded in the fairytale-like and yet uncanny-seeming basic mood that characterizes Ogawa’s literature. This mood is largely generated by sequences that will be defined in the present article as a mood tableau. After clarifying the issue of the production process and quality of mood in the text and the textual encoding of emotions (affects and feelings), text-based and empirical approaches from literary studies will be incorporated as an outlook on future research on this topic. The hypothesis is that due to the sensory and affective narration style, readers subconsciously shift to an affective perception mode, which subsequently turns into a feeling-oriented mode. This is because, in contrast to the characters, the reader cannot stop at the affective level and cognitively steps in for the protagonists, i.e. the reader reflects on the affective during the reading process and is moved by the feeling that the protagonist lacks; he fills the psychological void in the text. The affect–reaction model introduced here can also be applied to the works of other authors and, by its symbiosis of text-based and empirical approaches, has great potential for the affective sciences within literary studies.