Over the past decade, polemics and programmatic rehearsals have diminished while literary theory and interpretive literary criticism have matured. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic logic of the adaptationist program, and made exploratory efforts to formulate principles of interpretation that could be linked to specifically evolutionary ideas. In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. I then turn to a 19th-century memoir, Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu, to sketch the outlines of an experimental aesthetic and lifestyle poised precariously yet playfully between presentation and representation, ritual and sincerity. I draw on an emerging body of interdisciplinary scholarship on emotion and cognition as well as the continued, albeit misrecognized, role of ritual and its dialectic with sincerity.
Beginning with a recent film about the renowned Peking Opera performer Mei Lanfang, I argue that we moderns have lost the art of presentation epitomized by classical theater and that the representational aesthetic, exemplified by film, has become hegemonic in modern life, from the intimate sphere of the family to the public arena of civic and political engagement.
In this article, I propose a ritual theory of emotion that acknowledges the importance of codified rules of conduct, stylized modes of expression, and a shared subjunctive world as constitutive of a ritual social order that nonetheless admits of emotional plenitude. But sincerity and emotional authenticity have not always been first principles, and East Asian societies have traditionally subordinated emotion to ritual propriety. In contemporary Western societies, this usually translates into the imperative of being in touch with your feelings.
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