Rozhdestvenskaya E. Yu., Tartakovskaya I. In search of ethos, in flight from pathos: the place of affect in the museum and outside it. In: Politics of Affect: Museum as a Space of Public History, edited by A. Zavadsky, V. Sklez, K. Suverina M.: New Literary Review, 2019. P. 79-105.

Abstract

Modern museums of memory are united by the important social function of perpetuating and edifying, but each museum is contextual and creates its own form of representation, rhetoric and measure of performance in memory of past events. “Describing and understanding specific genres as social actions in a specific social and political context” allows researchers to explore museums more effectively. The prerequisite for this efficiency is probably the performativity of the current styles of museum exposition, as well as the tracking of resonance as a response to the coherence of the content and form of museum practice. Thus, a visitor to a museum is not only an object of a directed museum narrative, which has social and rhetorical-moralizing tasks, but also a subject that resonates in the interactive commemoration mode, an experiencing and emotionally responsive participant in the interaction. So, the object of this article is emotions and affects, generated intentionally or spontaneously in relation to the plots of institutionally organized commemoration. Empirical cases, designed to illustrate the production of emotions and affects, will cover a wide repertoire of commemoration - from restrained to pretentious, museum and non-museum, imposed and spontaneous.