Tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand
"Sentimentalist" redirects here. For the American cultural magazine, see Sentimentalist Magazine.
For other uses, see Sentimental (disambiguation).
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Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.[1]
Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Sentimentalism in literature refers to techniques a writer employs to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand[2] (and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments). The term may also characterize the tendency of some readers to invest strong emotions in trite or conventional fictional situations.[3]
"A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."[4] In James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegram that reads "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."[5] James Baldwin considered that "Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel...the mask of cruelty".[6]This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald contrasts sentimentalists and romantics, with Amory Blaine telling Rosalind, "I'm not sentimental—I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."[7]
^Serafin and Bendixen, p. 1014
^I. A. Richards gave just such a quantitative definition: "a response is sentimental if it is too great for the occasion." He added, "We cannot, obviously, judge that any response is sentimental in this sense unless we take careful account of the situation." (Richards, p. 258)
^This was essentially the defining criterion of "sentimental" discovered in a dozen basic handbooks by Wilkie (p. 564f); Wilkie appends some textbook definitions.
^Wilde 1905
^Jay Michael Dickson, "Defining the Sentamentalist in Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 1, Fall 2006, pp. 19-37
^Quoted in Berlant, p. 33
^F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, Book Two, Chapter 1
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