Affect Theory with Literature and Art: Between and Beyond Representation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text (ed.)
2019
_Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice_ develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me _do_ with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging postcritical moment.
Affect Theory: Defining Affect Theory for Literary Studies
Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion, 2022
Affect theory is not a settled method nor neatly delineated discipline. It is a dynamic field of scholarship that explores bodies, worlds, and forces that move and motivate things into relational existence. This chapter explores the rhizomatic terrain of affect theory and offers definitions of some key terms. This introduction discusses two major trajectories-the Spinoza/Deleuze trajectory and the Feminist/Queer/Cultural trajectory. Affect theory may refuse the singularity of an origin story but affect and literature have always been entangled and this chapter aims to give literary scholars and those new to affect theory a guide to the major approaches in affect theory, as well as an overview of current and emerging trajectories of thought.
Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text, ed. Stephen Ahern
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
The recent surge of interest in affect and emotion has productively crossed disciplinary boundaries within and between the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, but has not often addressed questions of literature and literary criticism as such. The first of its kind, Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism seeks theoretically informed scholarship that examines the foundations and practice of literary criticism in relation to affect theory. This series aims to stage contemporary debates in the field, addressing topics such as: the role of affective experience in literary composition and reception, particularly in non-Western literatures; examinations of historical and conceptual relations between major and minor philosophies of emotion and literary experience; and studies of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and disability that use affect theory as a primary critical tool.
In an exploration of the affect and its manifestations in art, the following essay examines an interactive work by contemporary artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Engaging
Nothing More than Feelings?: Affect Theory Reads the Age of Sensibility
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 2017
Scholars have turned recently to affect as a way to better understand human agency. This essay identifies key similarities in the preoccupations of affect theorists and writers of the age of sensibility, while considering both the usefulness of affect theory for the literary critic, and the political consequences of adopting the underlying assumptions of affect studies as a guide for critical practice. Recent theory offers a promising tool for interpreting the scenes of affective excess that punctuate literary and visual works in the eighteenth century, works governed by a representational mode that assumes heightened affect is significant in itself. Affect theorists focus on the emotional energies in interpersonal encounters, moving past interest in mere sociability to celebrate the power of raw affectual states to be transformative in themselves. The implication is that some emancipatory potential resides in the stimulation of the sensory-perceptual apparatus. Yet this potential cannot be articulated clearly, neither by affect theorists nor by writers of sensibility—for it's an article of faith in both camps that these limit intensities generate a profound knowing that is ineffable. The paper asks, finally, whether the underlying assumptions of current theory—as with the ideals of the age of sensibility that came before—are perhaps at best hopeful, and at worst naïve, perhaps no less conservative than progressive, and in the end prone to ridicule.
Inhabiting the world of affect: Mediation, critique and power in Ben Anderson’s Encountering Affect
Dialogues in Human Geography , 2018
In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson offers an extremely careful and considered, yet also truly engaging and enlivened, account of affective life across a range of social and geopolitical landscapes, sites and encounters. Drawing on a rich collection of theoretical resources, including Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Brian Massumi and Raymond Williams, the book provides an ambitious and distinctive account of the contemporary meaning and implications of affect. Anderson’s nuanced theoretical analysis is animated and fleshed out through a salient assemblage of empirical examples, from the affective atmospheres of neoliberalism, to the sensorial intensities of ‘total war’, to the everyday relationships between hope and music, to the racialized politics of affect in the writing of Frantz Fanon.
This Retrospectives collection offers a look at what the concept of affect has contributed to anthropology in the recent past and where it might take us in the near future. Although the practice of retrospection suggests its own affective character of being a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn, I hope to dial up the intensity some. Why? Because lately I get the sense that affect is escaping our theoretical grasp. Sure, this was one of the fundamental points of the affective turn (Clough and Halley 2007): if anthropologists of emotion throughout the 1970s and 1980s had shown how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse, anthropologists of affect shortly thereafter sought to show how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture. This proved incredibly stimulating for scholars who took this distinction between emotion and affect seriously, as it meant finding creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it. This held especially true for those working in and sometimes against the wake of the Writing Culture moment who understood that while poetics may quite possibly be all that we have,