Abstract
This chapter argues that contemporary literary criticism suffers from a reflexive faith in things, conceived broadly as static objects that reflect wider political, social, and cultural practices. Literature is re-imagined here as an open-ended event that demands an immanent materialism in which distinctions between literary objects and human bodies no longer stand up. By reflecting on the ambiguous “thingness” of Shakespeare, Vallelly draws attention to the elusive nature of things in theatrical spaces, and explores how this enigmatic materiality can be applied to literary experience more generally. To do so, he draws on Roberto’s Bolaño’s 2666, affect theory, and new materialism to construct a new literary materialism, one in which literary meaning is located neither in the human nor in the non-human world, but in the affective correspondence between these worlds. To illustrate this point, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the relationship between characters and stones in Shakespearean drama.
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- 1.
I borrow the term “beyond materiality” from the title of Knapp’s essay in Literature Compass (2014).
- 2.
Deleuze’s understanding of event is influenced by that of William James and of Alfred North Whitehead. Both James and Whitehead reject a “punctualist” metaphysics (Witmore 2008, 13–16), according to which singular events are joined together in a temporal continuity, and turn instead to a metaphysics of “activity” (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912) and “process” (Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 1920).
- 3.
As I have noted elsewhere, the potentially obfuscating appearance of things is a continual refrain throughout Bolaño’s works. In the case of Nazi Literature in the Americas—a fictional biography of imaginary right-wing writers—he even uses the literary form itself to illustrate that things might not be what they seem (see Vallelly 2016).
- 4.
Sara Ahmed discusses the “circulation of affect” in her idea of “affective economies,” whereby the more affect circulates between objects and signs the more “affective value” they generate (2012, 44–49).
- 5.
All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to The Norton Shakespeare (1997).
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Vallelly, N. (2019). (Non-)Belief in Things: Affect Theory and a New Literary Materialism. 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_3
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