Narratives of Affect/Affective Narratives: Recent Work on Emotion. Affect and Trauma

After years of scholarship in twentieth-century studies featuring the "waning of affect" (in Jameson's famous phrase about postmodernism), study of affect, emotion, trauma, and "feelings" in modern and contemporary literary and cultural texts is now, again, a topic of theoretical and critical attention, with a growing number of conferences, fellowships, books, and journal articles devoted to it. This course will read essays from (mostly) contemporary writers in our discipline with an eye toward seeing what the current debates and contexts are. We’ll take up the work of such writers as Kathleen Woodward, Lauren Berlant, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Eve Sedgwick, David Eng, Sianne Ngai, Ruth Leys, Michael Hardt, Sara Ahmed and others. We’ll ask such questions as: What is the relation of affect to postmodernism? What are the controversies in trauma studies? What are the stakes in differentiating “affect,” from “emotion?” What is affective labor? What about recent attention to “public feeling”? In addition to thinking through emotion, affect and trauma in socio-cultural contexts, we’ll also consider Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, and one or two other novels to see what they have to say about representations of these topics.
Since emotions have histories, and since various nations, classes, ethnicities, cultures, genders, and sexualities produce different affective narratives, students will be free to select a specific emotion/affect/site/visual or verbal text on which to write, and to situate this writing in a historical moment and particular culture of their choice.