Eric Cullhed: "Ubi sunt? On the Varieties of Poignancy"

Eric Cullhed, Uppsala University: "Ubi sunt? On the Varieties of Poignancy"

Abstract
Elegiac meditations on the fleetingness of life and the transitoriness of all things are encountered in textual traditions from all periods and regions of the world. A prime example is the Ubi sunt poem, where the speaker poignantly inquires about the fate of various precious things or moments of past glory, now engulfed by time. Over the past decade, two insightful yet disconnected and partially conflicting philosophical explorations have been presented of the type of emotion presumably aroused by such reflections on life’s transience. The first, by Scott Howard (2011, pp. 182–243; 2012), labels the phenomenon "lyrical emotions”; the second, by Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl (2021), uses the term 'melancholy'. The modest aim of this paper is to reframe and synthesize their insights, addressing apparent discrepancies between the two accounts and adding a handful of observations on the varieties, formal object(s), phenomenology and normativity of this type of affective experience.