Rebecca Bedell is the author of Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States.From her Q&A at the Princeton University Press blog:
Where did the book begin? What launched you on this project?--Marshal Zeringue
As an art historian and teacher, I have been thinking about these issues and themes for a long time. But in a way, this project began in a big way for me during Barack Obama’s presidency, when he was selecting a new Supreme Court justice. He said that one of the qualities that he valued in jurists was empathy. The backlash against that statement was so intense and powerful that it shocked me. To me, empathy, an ability to think oneself into the subject position of someone different from oneself, seems a critically important quality in a judge. Where did this angry, visceral reaction against the connective emotions of the sentimental come from?
At the same time, in my readings in my field of American art, I was continually coming upon statements such as, “Winslow Homer was never sentimental,” “John Singer Sargent’s paintings of children are never sentimental.” Yet their works—at least some of them—looked sentimental to me. Why this need to deny the presence of the sentimental in the works of artists we admire?
All of this came together to launch me on this project. I had become conscious of a broad societal aversion to and rejection of the sentimental in both art and public life, and I wanted to understand it historically. What caused this aversion? Where did it come from? When...[read on]