Replay: Timothy Hampton shares Five Things He's Learned about Cheerfulness
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“Cheerfulness is often overlooked by people who write about emotional or psychological life. Unlike many emotional states, it is fleeting. And yet, it is an essential emotion. As I’ll explain, its origin lies not in our deepest selves but in our social relationships. And we can control it—we can make ourselves cheerful. And when we do so, cheerfulness becomes an essential tool of emotional life.”
– Timothy Hampton, Five Things I've Learned about Cheerfulness
Timothy Hampton is the celebrated author of Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History. He is also Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Here’s the first five minutes of Tim’s 90-minute class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the historic roots of cheerfulness, and about how our control of this essential tool of emotional life lies not in our deepest selves but in our social relationships.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Cheerfulness explores the concept of cheerfulness and its significance in our lives. Rather than teaching how to be cheerful, Tim delves into the deep roots of cheerfulness in religion, its changing status during the European Enlightenment, and how it can help us understand our present-day situation. Through the works of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Austen, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim examines how cheerfulness influences human activity and its relevance today, offering valuable insights into this essential emotion.
Want something to feel especially happy about? This class is for you.
An award-winning teacher and scholar, Timothy has written widely about literature across languages and centuries, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to the present. In 2019, he published Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work, an innovative and much-praised study that broke new ground by focusing on the intersection of words and music in Dylan's compositions. His essays have appeared in such publications as Salon, Psyche, and Representations.
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