The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism
The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism

Author: Donald R. Wehrs

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 892

ISBN-13: 3319633031

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This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

Affect and Literature
Affect and Literature

Author: Alex Houen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-02-06

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1108558305

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This book considers how 'affect', the experience of feeling or emotion, has developed as a critical concept within literary studies in different periods and through a range of approaches. Stretching from the classical to the contemporary, the first section of the book, 'Origins', considers the importance of particular areas of philosophy, theory, and criticism that have been important for conceptualizing affect and its relation to literature. Includes ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, eighteenth-century aesthetics, Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. The chapters of the second section, 'Developments', correspond to those of the previous section and build on their insights through readings of particular texts. The final 'Applications' section is focused on contemporary and future lines of enquiry, and revolves around a particular set of concerns: media and communications, capitalism, and an environment of affective relations that extend to ecology, social crisis, and war.

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice
Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice

Author: Stephen Ahern

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-31

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 3319972685

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Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me do with a text? Contributors 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. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging postcritical moment.

Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity
Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity

Author: Wojciech Kaftanski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-03

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 100048064X

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This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis. Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age. Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Theatre of Anxiety
The Theatre of Anxiety

Author: Leila Michelle Vaziri

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-10-21

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 3111555089

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We are living in times when populism, war and climate change are all sources of anxiety caused by overlapping crises. Anxiety is a phenomenon that is not just reflected everywhere around us but is also increasingly manifesting itself in contemporary drama: particularly in the last five to ten years many new British dramas and theatre productions have given a stage to anxiety. Given this central role of anxiety, the aim of this study is to outline the interplay of theatre and anxiety on both a thematic and aesthetic level. It argues that a strand of contemporary theatre that combines topics of social, ecological, technological and pandemic importance with investigations into the philosophical and aesthetic implications of anxiety has come to prominence in recent years: the theatre of anxiety. This is traced across exemplary readings of a number of contemporary British plays by playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Zinnie Harris, Alistair McDowall and others. They show that contemporary drama and performance both aesthetically and thematically reflect and comment on global crises and catastrophes through the lens of anxiety as a feeling that 'colours' the perception of and reaction to these social and political conditions.

Handbook of Narrative Analysis
Handbook of Narrative Analysis

Author: Luc Herman

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1496218558

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Stories are everywhere, from fiction across media to politics and personal identity. Handbook of Narrative Analysis sorts out both traditional and recent narrative theories, providing the necessary skills to interpret any story. In addition to discussing classical theorists, such as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, Handbook of Narrative Analysis presents precursors (such as E. M. Forster), related theorists (Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn), and a large variety of postclassical critics. Among the latter particular attention is paid to rhetorical, cognitive, and cultural approaches; intermediality; storyworlds; gender theory; and natural and unnatural narratology. Not content to consider theory as an end in itself, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck use two short stories and a graphic narrative by contemporary authors as touchstones to illustrate each approach to narrative. In doing so they illuminate the practical implications of theoretical preferences and the ideological leanings underlying them. Marginal glosses guide the reader through discussions of theoretical issues, and an extensive bibliography points readers to the most current publications in the field. Written in an accessible style, this handbook combines a comprehensive treatment of its subject with a user-friendly format appropriate for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Handbook of Narrative Analysis is the go-to book for understanding and interpreting narrative. This new edition revises and extends the first edition to describe and apply the last fifteen years of cutting-edge scholarship in the field of narrative theory.

Affective Worldmaking
Affective Worldmaking

Author: Silvia Schultermandl

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2022-03-31

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 3839461413

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What makes up a public, what governs dominant discourses, and in which ways can counterpublics be created through narrative? This edited collection brings together essays on affect and narrative theory with a focus on the topics of gender and sexuality. It explores the power of narrative in literature, film, art, performance, and mass media, the construction of subjectivities of gender and sexuality, and the role of affect in times of crisis. By combining theoretical, literary, and analytical texts, the contributors offer methodological impulses and reflect on the possibilities and limitations of affect theory in cultural studies.

Forgiving Philosophy
Forgiving Philosophy

Author: Daniel R. Esparza

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-09-02

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 3111555801

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This book explores forgiveness as a philosophical matter. Responding to the curious omission of forgiveness in much of Western philosophy, it examines common themes and divergences on forgiveness in the works of Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Arendt. These writers understood forgiveness as a paradox—it must be contained to be given (Augustine), granted-yet-not-granted (Kierkegaard), and forgotten the moment it is given, as if never given at all (Arendt). Drawing on these insights, can forgiveness be then thought of as a hidden existential capacity and not as a magnanimous display of mercy? Can we imagine forgiveness as undoing the transgression we see, and secretly engaging with the imperceptible impossibility of undoing what has indeed been done?

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature
The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature

Author: Jean-François Vernay

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-11-18

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1040255493

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This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation.

Ethical Sense and Literary Significance
Ethical Sense and Literary Significance

Author: Donald R. Wehrs

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1000901386

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This study blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to explore how imaginative discourse addresses a distinctively human deep sociality, and by doing so helps shape cultural and literary history. Deep sociality, arising from an improbable evolutionary history, both entwines and leaves non-reconciled what is felt to be significant for us and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves. Ethical Sense and Literary Significance connects literary and cultural history without reducing the literary to a mere expression of something else. It argues that affective differences between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance are integral to the bioculturally evolved deep sociality that verbal art addresses—often in unsettling and socially critical ways. Much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences, Donald R. Wehrs explores the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields beyond literary studies, including neuroscience, anthropology, phenomenological philosophy, comparative history, and social psychology.