All the Feelings: Affect and Contemporary Writing

How - as readers, writers, critics, and thinkers - do we talk about how works of contemporary cultural production make us feel? What does it mean to ascribe to a text (a novel, a poem, a play, a film) the power to move? How do theoretical approaches to emotion and affect help us to understand relations between subjectivity and collective experience, politics and the personal? Students will consider how philosophical, psychological, and political understandings of the way we feel have influenced the engagements of twentieth-century and contemporary writers (amongst others) with the affective experiences and provocations of modern life. Exploring questions of aesthetics, hermeneutics, and ethics, the course invites students to attend to affective states as various as joy, fascination, expectation, nostalgia, boredom, shame, disappointment, and remorse, in a range of primary works including, but not necessarily limited to, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. We will ask how the formal qualities of texts, broadly understood, afford particular affective responses, and how we might theorise the range of emotions represented in and elicited by such material.