Affect Theory

Catalog description

This course examines how claims about feeling ground literary theory, with particular emphasis on the consequences of the affective turn in the early 2002s, from therapeutic criticism to the biopolitics of sentiment. How does the work of feeling register in literary form? What evidence is there that feelings are experienced, discussed, or represented in historically and culturally specific ways? When does affect theory turn to literature for evidence? How do competing conceptions of affect contribute to feminist, queer, and critical race theory? We will build genealogies from Deleuze and Sedgwick to more recent work by Terada, Ngai, Berlant, Terada, Schuller, Ahmed, and more. Literary readings will include a few novels (Charlotte Bronte, Sigrid Nunez), and long poems (Anne Carson; Claudia Rankine).