Browsing by Subject "Affect (Psychology) in literature"

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    Life in Our Language: Collaborative Imaginations of Home Through the Words of James Baldwin
    (2014) Hickey, Siobhan; Hucks, Tracey E., 1965-
    James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a writer who came to prominence during the American Civil Rights movement. During his career, he engaged issues of race, class, sexuality, and American identity through a plethora of novels, plays, short stories, essays, and more. A queer black man, Baldwin grappled constantly with these issues in his personal life as well. Much of his writing is autobiographical in nature, either directly or indirectly. His writing is also characterized by frequent ambiguity and contradiction, whether within a single sentence or between books written decades apart. Many early critics of Baldwin accuse this ambiguity of making his writing socially ineffective or structurally weak. This thesis asks whether there is a different way of reading ambiguity in Baldwin's work, one that highlights its abilities to create rather than obscure meaning. Through a trusting acceptance by the reader of the potential for Baldwin's ambiguity to be meaningful, a relational space is opened up between author and reader that allows it to become so. Within this space, the reader becomes the creator of meaning using Baldwin's language as a source of potential. I posit that this space may be thought of as homelike in the sense that it envelops reader and author alike, offering support through the process of meaning creation and consciousness expansion. I use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling — a text within the growing field of affect theory — as a theoretical tool to unpack the nature of the space that ambiguous passages in Baldwin create. Sedgwick offers several ways of rethinking the relationship between language and knowledge that allow for deeper insight into a similar project on Baldwin's part.
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    Theatres of Threat: Modern Feeling and Post-9/11 Consciousness in McEwan's Saturday
    (2017) Abujbara, Amira; Mohan, Rajeswari
    This paper explores Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday using affect theory and a postcognitivist lens. The novel follows a neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne carrying out weekend activities around London against the backdrop of the city’s protest against U.S. invasion into Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. This paper locates the novel’s aesthetics – especially its depictions of consciousness – in the modernist tradition, but explores how the novel departs from modernist aesthetics by breaking down the Cartesian duality between inside mind and outside world to instead offer what David Herman calls “the mind as distributed” across bodies, environments, other minds, and political discourses. We can understand its depiction of a post-9/11 consciousness as consisting and consisted by quotidian environments and experiences as well as political discourses around interventionism and counterterrorism and feelings of political anxiety, threat, precarity, and interventionism. Drawing from Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds, the paper uses the novel to explore how affect is a fundamental part of consciousness as well as a silent but seething register for personal and political negotiation. In this sense, the novel is located in a postmodern moment by undermining the autonomous, liberal subject itself through its postcognitivist depiction of consciousness. This explorations helps understand how literary works lean into predominant epistemologies – in this case liberalism, secularism, and what Immanuel Wallerstein calls European universalism – in order to critique these epistemologies from within, especially when no imagination for an alternative worldview is available.