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This chapter surveys important studies in affect theory published in 2021. In contrast to earlier scholarship that sought to define affect by debating now-standard genealogies—Spinoza to Deleuze; Tomkins to Sedgwick—this snapshot of affect theory’s development reveals myriad approaches bookended by an epistemological divergence. On one end are studies that embrace affect as an umbrella term for moving beyond emotions in a normative key. In these studies, what affect does eclipses what affect is. On the other end are studies that assert dissatisfaction with the world as ‘given’ in theoretical models of affect, particularly as that world is always already colonial, patriarchal, white, and so on. In these studies, neither what affect does nor what affect is dismantles a world that precludes decolonization, Black flourishing and the flourishing of other minoritized subjects. In between, a number of the studies surveyed here lean in one direction or the other, suggesting that this divergence is nascent but influential. I position these studies along a tentative spectrum, from affect’s embrace to its dissatisfactions, while also noting other scholarly conversations into which affect has lately entered, notably autotheory and the emergent idea of ‘vibe theory’. The review is organized into the following sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Affect’s Embrace: Staging Feeling; 3. Intimacy, Pleasure, Skin: What Is the Scale of Affect?; 4. The History and Poetry of Public Feeling: Two Eras of Revolt; 5. On Refusing the World: Yao’s and Palmer’s Dissatisfactions; 6. Reflections.
This chapter surveys important studies in affect theory published in 2021. In contrast to earlier scholarship that sought to define affect by debating now-standard genealogies—Spinoza to Deleuze; Tomkins to Sedgwick—this snapshot of affect theory’s development reveals myriad approaches bookended by an epistemological divergence. On one end are studies that embrace affect as an umbrella term for moving beyond emotions in a normative key. In these studies, what affect does eclipses what affect is. On the other end are studies that assert dissatisfaction with the world as ‘given’ in theoretical models of affect, particularly as that world is always already colonial, patriarchal, white, and so on. In these studies, neither what affect does nor what affect is dismantles a world that precludes decolonization, Black flourishing and the flourishing of other minoritized subjects. In between, a number of the studies surveyed here lean in one direction or the other, suggesting that this divergence is nascent but influential. I position these studies along a tentative spectrum, from affect’s embrace to its dissatisfactions, while also noting other scholarly conversations into which affect has lately entered, notably autotheory and the emergent idea of ‘vibe theory’. The review is organized into the following sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Affect’s Embrace: Staging Feeling; 3. Intimacy, Pleasure, Skin: What Is the Scale of Affect?; 4. The History and Poetry of Public Feeling: Two Eras of Revolt; 5. On Refusing the World: Yao’s and Palmer’s Dissatisfactions; 6. Reflections.
This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. Working across four central cases (Samuel Richardson’s “man of feeling” Sir Charles Grandison, Charlotte Smith’s self-effacing protagonist Lionel Desmond, Walter Scott’s “mediocre heroes,” and Jane Austen’s “creepmouse” heroine Fanny Price), the essay describes witness-protagonists as characters with an uncertain relation to the novel as a whole. Straddling the functions of narrator and character, witness and agent, they pose at once a formal problem (of where to place the character in relation to the story) and a political one (of who can participate in the life of the collective) that had particular salience in the era of emergent mass politics.
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