Narratives of Affect/Affective Narratives: Emotion in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture

After years of scholarship in twentieth-century studies featuring "waning of affect" (in Jameson's famous phrase about postmodernism), study of emotion, affect, 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 theories of emotion from a variety of disciplines, and think about their interarticulation with the shaping of story in texts from Mrs. Dalloway through recent election politics.
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 modern/contemporary historical moment and particular culture of their choice.
We'll think especially about literary fiction and narrative shape, the production of readerly affect, and the novel as a site for theorizing emotion. Writers we'll read will probably include Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, and Toni Morrison among others.