The Body in Wonder: Affective Suspension and Medieval Queer Futurity

Kao, Wan-Chuan

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_2

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“…One of the most illuminating is Wan-Chuan Kao's reading of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale , a text first published in 1400. His analysis is guided by an understanding that “premodern theories of affect [are] rooted in humoral theory and faculty psychology,” and the insight that medieval conceptions of “emotion” overlap with contemporary understandings of “affect” as biologically rooted, prediscursive, and unconscious (2019, p. 26). Kao draws on both strains of recent affect theory to produce a compelling reading, drawing on Tomkins to argue that a “wonder-shame script” is at work in the narrative, and contending that Chaucer's character inhabits a Deleuzean “fourth-person singular” that “constitutes itself as an identity position simultaneously virtual and actual” (p. 33).…”

Section: Affect As Intensity: Accounting For Traces On the Pagementioning

confidence: 99%

Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Ahern

2024

Emotion Review

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The “affective turn” is by now long established, part of a wider surge of interest in emotion playing out in a range of disciplines. In literary studies, the conversation about how affect theory might help us to interpret literature is still emerging. The goal of the present discussion is to provide a critical overview of work by scholars who draw on the insights of recent theory to read literary texts written in English. At the same time that the discussion offers an appraisal of the current state of scholarship, it also seeks to identify emerging new directions in research.

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Section: Affect As Intensity: Accounting For Traces On the Pagementioning

confidence: 99%

Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Ahern

2024

Emotion Review

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Affective Deception: Experiencing Genderplay in Louisa May Alcott

Poole¹

2022

ejas

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Speaking about the emotionality of texts, how they move us, generating effects, bodily sensations, Sara Ahmed points out that it is crucial to look at the ways texts name or perform emotions, how "[n]aming emotions often involves differentiating between the subject and object of feeling" (13), which in my case is myself feeling about a text but also a character's feelings about another character. This naming emotions also entails the different ways that figures-figures of speech but also figures of characters-"get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often 'work' through concealment" (13). Along with Ahmed, I want to refocus not necessarily on any emotion as being "in" a particular text, but on the "effects of the very naming of emotions" (13). This naming obviously revolves around words, but not only. These words are not cut off from bodies, instead "the work of emotion involves the 'sticking' of signs to bodies" (13), shame, disgust, joy, desire, etc., these are words for feelings, stuck to objects of feelings, generating effects and yet more affects. According to Ahmed, feelings "move, stick, and slide. We move, stick, and slide with them" (14).

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The Body in Wonder: Affective Suspension and Medieval Queer Futurity

Cited by 2 publications

References 23 publications

Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Affect Theory and Literary Criticism

Affective Deception: Experiencing Genderplay in Louisa May Alcott

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