Abstract
This introductory chapter situates the contributions of individual essays in this edited collection in the contexts of recent work in affect studies. Volume editor Stephen Ahern identifies concerns and insights shared by contributors as they work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. In the process Ahern provides a wide-ranging critical introduction to an emerging field of research, one still striving to determine how literary critical practice might best be informed by recent theorizations of affect.
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And so Massumi writes eloquently of “the virtual as cresting in a liminal realm of emergence, where half-actualized actions and expressions arise like waves on a sea to which most no sooner return” (1995, 92).
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To counter what he decries as a tradition of dualistic, even fascistic thinking that aims to negate difference and above all ascribe a stable identity to the subject, Deleuze collapses subject-object distinction. He instead develops a vision of decentralized networks of relations always marked by potential, by flux, by a perpetual state of becoming rather than being. Deleuze celebrates the generation of multiplicity in a process of creative movement figured as lines of flight, as circulations of depersonalized intensities; disparate entities coalesce on a “plane of consistency,” forging new combinations, “assemblages,” communities. The most influential articulation of the revolutionary potential of such planar relations comes in the book Deleuze wrote with Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), especially the chapters “Rhizome” (3–25) and “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible …” (232–309).
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In his investigation of major American writers and artists from the 1840s to the 1980s, Frank “discern[s] in the work of these artists an acutely receptive and reflexive attention to the movement of feeling across and between text and reader, or composition and audience” (2015, 1). To account for such movements Frank develops a heuristic model of “transferential poetics” drawing on the theories of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion.
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———. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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———. 2017. Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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———. 2007. Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Ahern, S. (2019). Introduction: A Feel for the Text. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_1
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