THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF AFFECT STUDIES AND

TEXTUAL CRITICISMEdited by

Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism

Donald R. Wehrs · Thomas Blake Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual

Criticism

EditorsDonald R. WehrsDepartment of EnglishAuburn UniversityAuburn, AL USA

Thomas BlakeEnglish/Philosophy DepartmentMonroe Community CollegeRochester, NYUSA

ISBN 978-3-319-63302-2 ISBN 978-3-319-63303-9 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951542

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Jonas Hafner/EyeEm

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Roger E. and Mary Ann Wehrsand

Joy Blake

vii

Preface

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism developed from conversations during the spring of 2015 between Ryan Jenkins, then an acquisitions editor for Palgrave Macmillan, and myself. These discussions began with a meeting at the 2015 MLA Conference, where I delivered a paper at a session on “Gender and Medieval Affect” arranged by the Soci-ety for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Both Ryan and I noted the growing prominence of “affect” as a topic within literary criticism. We also observed that radically different understandings of the term “affect” were in circula-tion, and that these differences reflected disjunctive theoretical orientations, intellectual lineages, and research agendas. Ryan suggested that I seek out between thirty and forty scholars, from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and areas of expertise, who would be willing to write essays for a handbook that would address affect/text relationships in a comprehensive and inclusive way.

Unvaryingly positive responses to the idea of producing such a handbook were sometimes accompanied by expressions of regret that heavy previous commitments precluded participation, but a sufficient number of scholars, located on three continents and representing a wide range of disciplines and specialties, generously agreed to contribute. I asked Thomas Blake, who had recently been a fellow contributor with me on another project, to undertake co-editor duties. Together, we put forth a proposal with a set of abstracts from projected contributors. Following a process of internal and external review by Palgrave Macmillan, we began work in January 2016 with more than thirty contributors on the essays in this volume.

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism is intended to meet several interrelated needs. First, it provides an orienting and authori-tative account of how scholarship on affect (broadly conceived) and schol-arship on texts (also broadly conceived, but with emphasis on literary texts) have come to inform one another over the past few decades. Second, it traces

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how explorations of the ways texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to much recent literary, film, performance, and arts criti-cism, as well as reshaped critical theory, cultural studies, rhetoric, and aesthet-ics. Third, the handbook offers readers a comprehensive guide 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. Fourth, the handbook showcases the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media opens up or enables. These include (but are not limited to) investi-gations of how attentiveness to affect reframe established methods of study-ing texts in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

In its effort to explore comprehensively the permutations of affect/text dynamics and to relate those permutations to a sustained rethinking of liter-ary, cultural, or social history, the Palgrave Handbook brings together, and puts in dialogue, strands of affect theorizing and criticism deriving from both post-structuralist philosophy and neurocognitive-evolutionary research. Link-ing contemporary discourse to a history of reflection upon affect that stretches from early antiquity to the present, and providing concise, accessible accounts of paradigm-shifting scientific research, the following essays present historiciz-ing accounts of cultural understandings of affectivity and analyze diverse forms of textual engagements with affect and emotions from ancient epic to contem-porary fiction. Encompassing criticism engaging affect in literature, film, rhet-oric, and performance studies, the handbook’s chapters chart the bearing of such criticism upon the formulating of new models for both period and genre research. For purposes of clarity, in this volume “affect studies” will refer to research, analysis, and criticism, from heterogeneous perspectives and intellec-tual traditions, focusing on affect, while “affect theory” and Affect Studies, capitalized, will refer to critical and theoretical discourse affiliated with work by Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

We have organized the volume’s essays into an introduction and three parts. The introductory chapter situates contemporary affect research, theory, and criticism within contexts of an unraveling, in our time, of mind-body dualisms that go back to cultural shifts in diverse ancient societies around the eighth-century BCE. The introduction links the story of humans’ reckon-ing with affect to the histories of philosophy, religion, aesthetic movements, political upheavals, and cultural innovations, including the advent of new artistic media. Textual engagement with affect spans the distance from surviv-ing fragments of Gilgamesh to the twenty-first-century formulations of neuro-cognitive-evolutionary criticism and Affect Studies theory.

The handbook’s first part, “Contexts and Foci,” explores the philosophi-cal and scientific bases of contemporary theorizing of affect and surveys their varieties. The two initial essays provide overviews of the current intellectual

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terrain. Noting that competing twenty-first-century scholarly discourses define “affect” and “emotion,” and understand their relationship, in quite different ways, Kate Stanley argues that renewed attention to William James’ physiological account of emotion may allow affect/emotion distinctions to be rethought along more ecumenical lines. In a similar vein, Brook Miller describes sharp differences between the approaches to literature offered by affect theory, on the one hand, and by cognitive criticism, on the other. After delineating the philosophical, political stakes in those differences, he sketches possibilities for interconnecting aspects of each approach within enlarged, subtler modes of analyzing and interpreting literature.

The essays that immediately follow stress affect’s entwinement with cog-nition and sociality, and assess the mixed consequences of that entwine-ment. Bruce McConachie argues that bio-culturally evolved sociality most likely spurred the development of early human proto-languages from which symbolic language emerged, and Julia Reinhard Lupton explores how the “trust” cultivated in theatrical performance may be viewed as an index of its importance within affective and cultural life more broadly. Like McConachie, Lupton emphasizes the importance of mimesis for developing the emotions crucial to human bonding. Again like McConachie, she explores the role of social bonding in sustaining an ethically responsible political life. Patrick Colm Hogan, by contrast, considers how categorization, through establish-ing in-groups and out-groups, regulates cognition and affective responsive-ness in ways that, though reinforcing selective sociality, also restrict how much and to whom empathy is directed and encouraged. Thomas Blake notes that it appears we are burdened by an embodied “affective aversion” to those who are different from ourselves, even though, studies reveal, we also possess a physiological resistance to observe others in physical or emotional pain. Blake argues that fiction, as a means of understanding other people’s intentions, goals, and desires, can help provide us with “a common point of view” that promotes collective well-being without demanding a dogmatic or exclusionary moral absolutism. Fiction, of course, presumes narrative, and in the following essay Claudia Breger delineates how diverse models of affective narratology reflect competing philosophical assumptions and political agen-das. She argues that while work in Affect Studies remains largely antinarrative, current (dominantly cognitive) narratological work on emotion does not avail itself of Affect Studies’ conceptual possibilities. Seeking to redress the limita-tions in each approach, she concludes her essay with a sketch of how a syn-cretic affective narratology, embracing aspects of contrastive models, might be formulated.

The first part concludes with three theoretically oriented essays. Rich-ard C. Sha argues that sharp distinctions between “affect” and “emotion” problematically continue post-structuralist critiques of rationality, putting at risk our ability to acknowledge that social subjects are more than effects of (involuntary) resonances among bodies or parts thereof. Along similar lines,

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Charles Altieri questions whether any aesthetics keyed to “New Materialist” versions of affect theory can account for the agency of affect as it is registered within the consciousness of an individuated, singular human subject. Precisely the agency of the feeling, the consciousness of, affective surprise, he argues, is a central theme of both Romantic and Modernist poetry, which makes the appreciative reading of such poetry a corrective of dubiously sweeping theoretical claims. In the final essay of Part One, Marshall Alcorn seeks an alternative to the limited, flawed options that follow from elaborations of Plato’s Reason/Emotion binary. He advocates turning instead to Aristotle’s “phantasia/belief” counterpart, within which, Alcorn argues, reason and emotion, rather than being separate, overlap, with consequences that Aristotle delineates in his Poetics and Rhetoric.

The Palgrave Handbook’s second part, “Affectivity and Textuality,” addresses permutations of how texts trigger and shape affects, and how sus-ceptibility to diverse affects conditions responsiveness to particular textual fea-tures. Dana Munteanu discusses two affects central to literary art—empathy and love—and their textual eliciting through narrative techniques that create an impression of familiarity with imaginary people and reorder felt experience in relation to cultural expectations. Florion Cova, Julien Deonna, and David Sander, writing collectively, address the question of why we enjoy sad and serious narratives. Drawing on recent research in communication theory and media psychology, they suggest that when narratives provide us occasions to reflect on deep and meaningful truths about human lives, we experience the positive emotion of “being moved.” Jeff Pruchnic notes that Kenneth Burke’s mid-twentieth-century writings on literary and rhetorical theory delineate intersections of human physiological response with formal aspects of culture and art, thus anticipating and implicitly engaging contemporary cognitive criticism and affect theory.

Observing that Aristotle’s account of tragedy has one foot in affect and another in interpretation of emotion, Matthew J. Smith argues that the generic tension Aristotle implicitly identified has spurred innovations in tragic form from Sophocles and Seneca to Shakespeare and Chekhov. Donald R. Wehrs traces how epic, romance, and the novel offer generically distinct affor-dances for eliciting and shaping affect, and explores how Homer, Chrétien de Troyes, Jane Austen, and Duong thu Huong exploit those affordances to entwine affect’s disruptive, reorienting capacities with increased cogni-tive flexibility and enlarged sociable affections. Building upon the narrative theorizing of James Phelan and Meir Sternberg, Howard Sklar sketches how fictions engender sympathy, as distinct from empathy, for particular charac-ters. W. B. Gerard blends recent cognitive research with historicizing analysis to explore interpretative and cultural issues raised by late eighteenth-century England’s textual and visual interest in a melancholy literary figure, “Poor Maria,” derived from the works of Laurence Sterne. Part Two concludes with Jaimey Fisher’s account of film studies’ shift from psychoanalytic paradigms,

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dominant in the 1980s, to cognitivist and affect-oriented approaches, asso-ciated with David Bordwell, Carl Plantinga, Steven Shaviro, and Eugenie Brinkema. Through readings of crucial scenes within Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, he demonstrates the fruitfulness of combining diverse modes of film theory.

The handbook’s third part, “Varieties of Affective/Textual Interplay,” explores affect/text dynamics as they play out in different periods and genres, and in the details of individual works. Addressing the question of how cultur-ally specific a given affect may be, Antonina Harbus considers a range of key Old and Middle English texts from Beowulf to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. Noting that a col-lection of fourteenth-century English lyrics recruits conflicting prosodic cues from alliterative and accentual-syllabic meters, Nicholas Myklebust argues that, by arresting the biological surprise response that occurs when rhythmic predictions fail, the poems seek to induce an apophatic or negative stance toward analytic categories and textual events—in effect, making meter a vehi-cle for eliciting wonder at the expense of certainty. Julien J. Simon suggests that Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina (1499), one of the first books of prose fic-tion written in Spanish after the appearance of the printed press, addresses at once a learned and popular audience in complex ways that a cognitive-histor-icist approach is best equipped to explore. Howard Mancing links Don Quix-ote’s extraordinary popularity and influence to the way Cervantes prompts readers to attribute thoughts to Quixote without specifying exactly what those thoughts are.

Cecilia Sjöholm argues that Descartes, instead of viewing agitation of mind as necessarily detrimental to thought, as in classical Stoicism, instead con-sidered that arts, by producing emotions, could play a positive role in shap-ing judgment—not through controlling emotions or preventing affects, but through evoking them. Turning to the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and related materials, Mark Bruhn delineates Wordsworth’s affective poetics and situates it in relation to both Wordsworth’s own literary-historical moment and our cognitive-neuroscientific one. Marta Figlerowicz relatedly argues that reimagining Kierkegaard as a theorist of affectively driven thinking helps us discern a conceptual gap in the way we analyze affects in our day and age. This gap consists in affect theory’s simultaneous insistence that an affect the-orist is moved, and even possessed, by her affects, and that she can quasi-objectively evaluate their broader import. Kierkegaard’s writing, by contrast, enables us to see this theoretical position as a missed (but not irretrievable) opportunity for deeper engagement with affects as experiences of losing criti-cal scale and distance.

Audrey Jaffe suggests that the Victorian novel deals with the new social mobility of persons in the nineteenth-century England by rendering what we tend to call “class” as a bodily affect, and further suggests that the nam-ing and classification that characterizes Charles Darwin’s work and, more

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insistently, Silvan Tomkins’ theorizing of affect, as well as novelistic descrip-tions identifying social or class affiliations, share dominant nineteenth-cen-tury forms of representation. Tracing the history of film music from The Birth of a Nation (1915) to The Dark Knight (2012), William Wehrs shows how such music acts on both affects, defined by Carl Plantinga as “felt bod-ily states,” and emotions. Musical leitmotifs may cue audience response to character, but also link motifs to character and narrative development, though current film music is often minimalist and tied to the sound design in ways that contribute to emotionally flattened, dehumanized qualities in films such as The Dark Knight. Lorna Wood uses Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the affective dimensions of fascism to highlight how characters in Lolita are driven by fascistic desires that Nabokov portrays as delusory traps. Toward the end of the novel, however, Wood argues, Nabokov depicts both Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert in ways suggestive of what recent cognitive studies call altruism born of suffering (ABS), even as his literary art pushes readers toward Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and so the “kindness” and “tenderness” that Nabokov identified with “aes-thetic bliss.”

Reading Bret Easton Ellis’s slasher satire American Psycho (1991) as a novel about the displacement of affects in capitalism, Doug Haynes investi-gates how structures of feeling in the finance economy of the narrative are both symptomatic and constitutive of the capitalist relationship, the hor-rors of which are literalized in Patrick Bateman, Ellis’s financier protagonist and serial killer. Isabel Jaén examines how Dulce Chacón’s 2002 novel La voz dormida (The Sleeping Voice) and its 2011 film adaptation seek to evoke and transmit affects in ways that will contribute to Spain’s memoria histórica movement, which endeavors to gain public acknowledgement of the crimes of Franco’s fascist regime, despite continuing obstruction by Franco’s sym-pathizers. Noting that diverse studies indicate that positive interpersonal and social relationships are highly correlated with place-attachment, Nancy East-erlin adopts the perspective of place studies to interpret changing feelings for material spaces as a result of evolving human relationships in Colm Tóibín’s contemporary Irish novel, The Blackwater Lightship. She reads the novel as elaborating a process of positive place-reconstruction in members of a frac-tured family, a process initiated by the appearance of a brother dying of AIDS and the community of gay friends caring for him.

While the essays comprising The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism certainly do not speak with a single voice—considerable diversity of judgments, focus, theoretical commitments, and research para-digms are represented—they offer, individually and collectively, accounts of how receptivity to neurocognitive-evolutionary and/or affect theory analysis has reshaped textual criticism over the past few decades, and they showcase what such criticism looks like and what it may achieve. Doing so, the essays

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sketch a variety of approaches to innovative research, the elaboration and amplification of which is likely to transform and enrich humanities scholarship for the foreseeable future.

Auburn University, USA April 2017

Donald R. Wehrs

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acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Ryan Jenkins, who as an acquisitions editor for Palgrave Macmillan helped initiate this volume, and Allie Bochicchio and Emily Janakiram, who as acquisitions editor and edito-rial assistant ably brought it to completion. We are particularly grateful to Prof. Jeremy Downes, Chair of the English Department at Auburn University, and Prof. Paula Backscheider, Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar at Auburn University, for their invaluable assistance in securing summer 2016 research funding and travel funding crucial for the timely completion of the project. Discussions with many colleagues at Auburn University over a number of years contributed to the Palgrave Handbook’s shape and con-tent. Profs. R. James Goldstein, Craig Bertolet, Anna Berlolet, Jonathan Bolton, Alicia Carroll, Emily Friedman, Benjamin Fagan, Chris Keirstead, Erich Nunn, Derek Ross, James Ryan, Marc Silverstein, and Chad Wick-man have offered informative and encouraging comments, and the English Department has been accommodating in freeing up time for editorial duties. The staff of Ralph Draughon Library at Auburn University has been unfail-ingly professional and prompt in dealing with a great many interlibrary loan and other requests.

Much appreciated interest and support have been extended by a wide range of scholars, including Sue J. Kim of the University of Massachu-setts, Lowell; Naomi Greyser of the University of Iowa; Rüdiger Campe of Yale University; Peter Schneck of Osnabrück University, Germany; Joel Falfak of the University of Western Ontario; Patrizia Lombardo of the Uni-versity of Geneva; Merja Polvinen of the University of Helsinki; Alexa Weik von Mossner of Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria; and Catherine Connor-Swietlicki of the University of Vermont. Further thanks are due Dou glas L. Cairns, University of Edinburgh; David Konstan, New York University; F. Elizabeth Hart, University of Connecticut; Keith Oatley,

xvi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

University of Toronto; Raymond A. Mar, York University; David Miall, University of Alberta; Katya Haustein, University of Kent; Paul Armstrong, Brown University; Alan Richardson, Boston College; Suzanne Keen, Wash-ington and Lee University; David Duff, University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California; Mark Collier, University of Minnesota, Morris; Marina Grishakova, University of Tartu, Estonia; and Steven Shankman, University of Oregon.

All reasonable effort has been made to locate copyright holders of cited material. Permission to reprint parts of John Ashbury’s poem, “As We Know,” has been kindly granted by Georges Borchardt, Inc. and Carcanet Press. Assistance from Will Vunderink and Foichl Miah is much appreciated. Permission to reprint parts of W. H. Auden’s poem, “Lullaby,” has been gra-ciously extended by Penguin-Random House. We extend our thanks to Sherri Hinchley.

Above all we would like to express our deep appreciation for the efforts of this volume’s contributors, who have made time in busy schedules and amid the pressure of other projects and commitments for the writing of their chap-ters, and have with patience and diligence accommodated their essays to the handbook’s various needs. To Lorna Wood much gratitude is due for being willing to undertake proofreading duties. For the continuing support, advice, and forbearance of friends and family, especially the editors’ wives and chil-dren, no formal acknowledgement is sufficient.

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contents

1 Introduction: Affect and Texts: Contemporary Inquiry in Historical Context 1Donald R. Wehrs

Part I Contexts and Foci

2 Affect and Emotion: James, Dewey, Tomkins, Damasio, Massumi, Spinoza 97Kate Stanley

3 Affect Studies and Cognitive Approaches to Literature 113Brook Miller

4 The Bio-Cultural Evolution of Language and Prosocial Emotions 135Bruce McConachie

5 Trust in Theater 155Julia Reinhard Lupton

6 Social Identity: Categorization, Cognition, and Affect 183Patrick Colm Hogan

7 Affective Aversion, Ethics, and Fiction 207Thomas Blake

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8 Affect and Narratology 235Claudia Breger

9 The Turn to Affect: Emotions Without Subjects, Causality Without Demonstrable Cause 259Richard C. Sha

10 Are There States of Mind Which We Can Call “Inner Sensuousness”? 279Charles Altieri

11 Affect and Intention in Rhetoric and Poetics 299Marshall Alcorn

Part II Affectivity and Textuality

12 Empathy and Love: Types of Textuality and Degrees of Affectivity 325Dana LaCourse Munteanu

13 “That’s Deep!”: The Role of Being Moved and Feelings of Profundity in the Appreciation of Serious Narratives 347Florian Cova, Julien Deonna and David Sander

14 The Priority of Form: Kenneth Burke and the Rediscovery of Affect and Rhetoric 371Jeff Pruchnic

15 Tragedy “Before” Pity and Fear 391Matthew J. Smith

16 Narrative and Affect in Epic, Romance, and the Novel 413Donald R. Wehrs

17 Empathy’s Neglected Cousin: How Narratives Shape Our Sympathy 451Howard Sklar

18 Laurence Sterne’s “Poor Maria” as Model of Empathic Response 481W.B. Gerard

CONTENTS xix

19 Film and Affect, Theories Entwined: The Case of the War Genre in Saving Private Ryan (Steven Speilberg, 1998) 513Jaimey Fisher

Part III Varieties of Affective/Textual Interplay

20 Medieval English Texts and Affects: Narratives as Tools for Feeling 545Antonina Harbus

21 Rhythmic Cognition in Late Medieval Lyrics: BL MS Harley 2253 577Nicholas Myklebust

22 A Wild Fable: Affect and Reception of Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina (1499) 609Julien J. Simon

23 Don Quixote’s Affective Thoughts 627Howard Mancing

24 Descartes, Emotions and the Inner Life of the Subject 653Cecilia Sjöholm

25 “The History and Science of Feeling”: Wordsworth’s Affective Poetics, Then and Now 671Mark J. Bruhn

26 Kierkegaard’s “Ugly Feelings” 695Marta Figlerowicz

27 Affect and the Victorian Novel 713Audrey Jaffe

28 Affect and Film Music: A Brief History 735William Wehrs

29 Affect and Fascism in Lolita 753Lorna Wood

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30 From Bateman to Rat Man: American Psycho’s Unnatural Selections 781Doug Haynes

31 Fascism, Torture, and Affect in Postwar Spain: Memoria Histórica Narratives and Audience Empathy 803Isabel Jaén

32 Place-in-Process in Colm Toíbín’s The Blackwater Lightship: Emotion, Self-Identity, and the Environment 827Nancy Easterlin

Index 855

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editors and contributors

About the Editors

Donald R. Wehrs is Hargis Professor of English Literature at Auburn University, where he teaches eighteenth-century British literature, critical theory, and comparative literature. He is editor of Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature (Delaware, 2013), co-editor (with Mark J. Bruhn) of Cognition, Literature, and History (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor (with David P. Haney) of Levinas and Nineteenth-Century Literature (Delaware, 2009). He has published three monographs on twentieth-century African fiction—Pre-Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives (Ashgate, 2008), Islam, Ethics, Revolt (Lexington, 2008), and African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values (2001)—as well as book chapters and journal articles on British fiction, Shakespeare, postcolonial literature, and medieval romance.

Thomas Blake is Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy at Monroe Community College, New York. He is author of “Maternity, Morality, and Metaphor: Galdos’s Doña Perfecta, Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, and Andalusian Culture,” in Cognition, Literature, and History (Routledge, 2014) and “Staging Heidegger: Corporeal Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the Theater” in Destiny, the Inward Quest, Temporality and Life (Springer, 2011).

Contributors

Marshall Alcorn Professor and Chair of English at George Washington University, is author of Resistance to Learning: Overcoming the Desire Not to Know in the Classroom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which documents emo-tional components in human reasoning, Changing the Subject in English Class (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), and Narcissism and the Literary

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Libido (New York State University Press, 1994). Changing the Subject in English Class won the 2002 Ross Winterowd Award.

Charles Altieri the Rachael Anderson Stageberg Endowed Chair Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of The Art of 20th-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell-Wiley, 2009), Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value (Cornell University Press, 2013), and Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Cornell University Press, 2015).

Claudia Breger as of July 2017, is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and formerly Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, emphasizing film, literary and cul-tural theory, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. Her recent book publications include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Film, Literature and Theater in Contemporary Germany (Ohio State University Press, 2012). She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema.

Mark J. Bruhn Professor of English at Regis University, is co-editor (with Donald R. Wehrs) of Cognition, Literature, and History (Routledge, 2014) and guest-editor of a special double-issue of Poetics Today on “Poetics and Cognitive Science” (2011). Related work has appeared in European Romantic Review, Studies in Romanticism, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies.

Florian Cova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. Combining both conceptual and experimental approaches, his work in experimental philosophy focuses on the psychological mechanisms underly-ing our value judgments, in the moral as well as in the aesthetic realm.

Julien Deonna is Associate Professor in philosophy at the University of Geneva and project leader at the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. He spe-cializes in the philosophy of emotions, in particular the perception of emo-tions in others, the relation between emotion and value, moral emotions and moral psychology.

Nancy Easterlin University Research Professor, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of New Orleans, is author of A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Johns Hopkins, 2012) and guest-editor of “Cognitive Pedagogies” special issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2014.

Marta Figlerowicz is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale. She is the author of Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017). Her work has also appeared in academic and non-academic

EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

journals including New Literary History, Poetics Today, symplokē, Film Quarterly, n+1, Jacobin and Boston Review.

Jaimey Fisher is Professor of German and Cinema & Digital Media at the University of California, Davis, where he is also Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute. He is author of Christian Petzold (University of Illinois, 2013) and Disciplining Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2007), and has edited or co-edited Generic Histories of German Cinema (Camden House, 2013), Collapse of the Conventional (Wayne State University Press, 2010), Spatial Turns (Rodopi, 2010), and Critical Theory (Berghahn, 2001). He is currently completing a study of the German war film, 1913–1961.

W. B. Gerard Professor of English, Auburn University at Montgomery, is author of Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Ashgate, 2006), edi-tor of Divine Rhetoric (Delaware, 2010), co-editor of Swiftly Sterneward (Delaware, 2010), and co-editor (with Melvyn New) of Volume 9 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, The Miscellaneous Writings (2014). He is co-editor of The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats.

Antonina Harbus is Professor and Head of Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her current research on medie-val and more recent English texts combines literary analysis with ideas and methods from cognitive science to investigate how the mind makes mean-ing from a text. Her research program includes investigations into literature and emotion, ideas about the self and autobiographical memory in literature, metaphor and concepts of the mind, and narrative poetry. She is author of Cognitive Approaches to Anglo-Saxon Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2012), Helena of Britain in Medieval Legend (Brewer, 2002), and The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Rodopi, 2002), and co-editor of three volumes on medieval literature and culture.

Doug Haynes is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex, UK. His works on modern and contemporary American writers and artists such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Mike Kelley, and Louise Bourgeois have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, Textual Practice, and American Literary History as well as in many edited collections. His critical approach and research interests lie in Critical Theory, economy, affect, and everyday life. He has co-edited (with Tara Stubbs) an essay collection, Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2017) and (with Joanna Freer) a forthcoming special issue of Textual Practice, “Pynchonomics: Political and Economic Writing in Thomas Pynchon.” He is currently the Director of the Sussex Centre for American Studies, University of Sussex.

Patrick Colm Hogan is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he is a member of the English Department, as well as the Program in Cognitive Science. He is the author of nineteen

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books, including The Culture of Conformism: Understanding Social Consent (Duke, 2001), Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition (Routledge, 2014), Narrative Discourse (Ohio State University Press, 2013), How Authors’ Minds Make Stories (Cambridge, 2013), Affective Narratology (Nebraska, 2011), and Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism (Nebraska, 2016).

Isabel Jaén Associate Professor of Spanish, Portland State University, is co-editor (with Julien J. Simon) of Cognitive Literary Studies (Texas, 2012), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford, 2016), and Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain: Studies in Honor of Howard Mancing (Juan de la Cuesta, 2017).

Audrey Jaffe Professor of English, University of Toronto, is the author of The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real (Oxford, 2016), The Affective Life of the Average Man (Ohio State University Press, 2010), Scenes of Sympathy (Cornell University Press, 2000), and Vanishing Points (University of California Press, 1991).

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where she has taught since 1989. She is the author or co-author of five books on Shakespeare, including Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago, 2011), Saints-Citizens: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago, 2005), and Shakespeare Dwelling: Scenes for the Theater of Life (2017).

Howard Mancing Professor of Spanish, Purdue University, is author of Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Reference Guide (Greenwood, 2006), The Cervantes Encyclopaedia, 2 vols. (Greenwood, 2003), and has published numerous essays on Spanish Golden Age literature and cognitive literary theory.

Bruce McConachie has written or edited ten books in the fields of thea-tre history, historiography, and cognition and culture. He is co-author (with Nicola Shaughessy) of Affective Performance and Cognitive Science (Methuen, 2014), author of Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (2015), Theatre and Mind (Palgrave, 2013), Engaging Audiences (Palgrave, 2008), American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War (2003), and co-editor (with Elizabeth Hart) of Performance and Cognition (Routledge, 2006). He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Brook Miller is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Morris. His most recent book, Self-Consciousness in Modern British Fiction (Palgrave, 2013), traces the models of consciousness described in modernist and post-modern fictions in relation to historical and contemporary philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific theories of self-consciousness. His current project probes the relations between narrative and experience in relation to recent advances in the study of consciousness, emotion, and embodiment.

EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xxv

Dana LaCourse Munteanu is an Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. She is the author of Tragic Pathos. Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge, 2012), the editor of Emotion, Genre and Gender in Classical Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2011), and co-editor of A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (Blackwell, 2017).

Nicholas Myklebust an Assistant Professor of English, teaches medieval lit-erature and linguistics at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. His research focuses on early English metrics.

Jeff Pruchnic is an Associate Professor and Director of Composition in the Department of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Transhuman Condition (Routledge 2013) as well as numerous essays on rhet-orics of science, politics, media, and technology.

David Sander is Full Professor in psychology at the University of Geneva and director of the Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences. He specializes in the psychology and neurosciences of emotions, in particular the role of appraisal processes in emotion elicitation, the effects of emotion on attention, memory, and decision-making.

Richard C. Sha Professor, Department of Literature, American University, is co-editor (with Joel Faflak) of Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge, 2014), and author of Perverse Romanticism (Johns Hopkins, 2009) and The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (Pennsylvania, 1998).

Julien J. Simon is Associate Professor of Spanish and French, World Languages and Cultures Department, Indiana University East. His research focuses on early modern studies, cinema and literature, and cognitive approaches to literature and film. He is co-founder of the Literary Theory, Cognition, and the Brain working group at the Whitney Humanities Center in Yale University (2005) and former member of the executive committee for the MLA Division on Cognitive Approaches to Literature (chair in 2013). He is co-editor of Cognitive Literary Studies (Texas, 2012), Cognitive Cervantes (Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 2012), Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature (Oxford, 2016), and Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain: Studies in Honor of Howard Mancing (Juan de la Cuesta, 2017).

Cecilia Sjöholm Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörns University, Sweden, is author of The Antigone Complex (Stanford, 2004) and Kristeva and the Political (Routledge, 2005). She has co-edited books on aesthetics and trans-lation, and published essays on Arendt, Foucault, Lacan, and Glissant.

Howard Sklar, Ph.D. is University Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages (English Philology Unit) at the University of Helsinki. He has written frequently on the rhetorical and ethical implications of literary fiction,

xxvi EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

particularly in terms of narrative sympathy and the fictional representation of intellectual disability, and is author of The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Ethical and Emotional Persuasion (John Benjamins, 2013).

Matthew J. Smith is Assistant Professor at Azusa Pacific University and Associate Editor of Christianity & Literature. He is author of the forthcom-ing book, Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street: Theatricality and Religion in Early Modern England, and co-editor of the volume, Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Philosophy, Performance.

Kate Stanley is Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Her contributions to the study of American literature, literary modernism, and pragmatism have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary History, Criticism, The Henry James Review, Modernity/modernity, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her book, Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

William Wehrs is a junior at Ursinus College and an Ursinus College Scholar. He is a history major, a member of the national history honor soci-ety, Phi Alpha Theta, and a film studies minor. A violin student since age four, he is currently associate concertmaster of the Ursinus String Ensemble.

Lorna Wood is an independent scholar, writer, and violinist with a Ph.D. in English from Yale University. She has published essays on children’s literature and the American Renaissance, as well as fiction and poetry, and she is associ-ate editor of Gemini Magazine. Her poetry has been favorably reviewed on NewPages.com.

xxvii

list of figures

Fig. 5.1 Hoodman-blind, based on a fourteenth-century MS; from Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London: William Reeves, 1830), p. 393. Public domain 165

Fig. 13.1 A tentative model of our engagement with serious narratives 365Fig. 18.1 W.W. Ryland, 1779 engraving after Angelica Kauffmann,

Maria near Moulines (1777) 483Fig. 18.2 Wedgwood blue-and-white jasperware bud vase with

“Poor Maria” motif (c. 1970) 484Fig. 18.3 W.M. Craig, Richard Austin (engr.) from Laurence Sterne,

A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (London: Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, 1807), frontispiece 495

Fig. 18.4 Edward Edwards, P.W. Tomkins (engr.) from Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (London: W. Strahan, J. Rivington and Sons, et al., 1780), frontispiece 496

Fig. 18.5 Maurice Leloir, from Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1885), 181 502

Fig. 19.1 Captain Miller is shocked, both psychologically and physically, upon landing on the beach during D-Day in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan 521

Fig. 19.2 Miller’s POV shot upon fellow US soldier having a breakdown amid the combat in Saving Private Ryan 521

Fig. 19.3 After donning his helmet, Miller begins to move forward, here from high angle implying German defenses, in Saving Private Ryan 521

Fig. 19.4 Miller now moving faster and forward, screen left to right and shot from low angle, in Saving Private Ryan 521

Fig. 19.5 Introduction of Miller by extreme close-up on his quivering hand in Saving Private Ryan 524

xxviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 19.6 Lingering shot of the quivering hand on canteen in Saving Private Ryan 525

Fig. 19.7 Deliberate use of water and mist to convey cross-modal sensory experience in Saving Private Ryan 526

Fig. 19.8 A watery death as a cross-modal sensory experience in Saving Private Ryan 526

Fig. 19.9 Miller arrives at a command post, where his superiors have privileged access to bodily comforts, in Saving Private Ryan 526

Fig. 19.10 Miller’s POV shot on steaming coffee after the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan 527

Fig. 19.11 Miller’s POV shot, underscoring bodily appeal of a good sandwich after the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan 527

Fig. 19.12 Steaming coffee on break from front in G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930) 527

Fig. 19.13 Somatic empathy via a hot cup of coffee in the hand in G.W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 528

Fig. 19.14 Proxemic patterns in shot crowded with bodies in Saving Private Ryan 529

Fig. 19.15 Even more extreme proxemic patterning with bodies crowded in the frame in Saving Private Ryan 529

Fig. 19.16 French family tries to hand daughter to US soldiers and safety in Saving Private Ryan 532

Fig. 19.17 Caparzo holds and comforts young girl in Saving Private Ryan 533Fig. 19.18 Over-the-should shot of distant tower with sniper

in Saving Private Ryan 533Fig. 19.19 Reverse shot of Jackson, the company sharp shooter, taking

aim at German sniper in Saving Private Ryan 533

xxix

list of tables

Table 13.1 Descriptions of eliciting situations as negative (or not) and positive (or not) in Cova & Deonna (2014) 359

Table 13.2 Physiological sensations and bodily feelings depending on the eliciting situation (Cova, Deonna & Sander, 2017). Bold characters indicate statistically significant differences between the two groups (p < 0.05) 360

Table 13.3 Average scores (and standard deviation) for each question and each kind of statement 364

1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Affect and Texts: Contemporary Inquiry in Historical Context

Donald R. Wehrs

general introduction

Literary criticism and allied fields in the early twenty-first century have witnessed an explosion of interest in how texts represent, reflect on, enact, and elicit affect, and in how affect/text dynamics bear on emotions, cogni-tion, aesthetics, and culture’s relation to ethics and politics. No single vol-ume, however, has comprehensively engaged the scope of new theoretical and interpretative work, nor put its various disciplinary sources, components, and branches into sustained, inclusive dialogue. This handbook aspires to do so.

In the twentieth century, “affect” was commonly associated with bodily causality and natural science, “emotion” with ideas, outlook, social science, and the humanities. This division was rooted in philosophical, religious lega-cies of mind/body dualism—the idea that mind and body belong to different realities or orders of being. Mind/body, spirit/matter splits may be viewed as constitutive of ultimate reality, as in much Greek, Judeo-Christian, and Islamic thought, but they may also be viewed as illusory perceptions gener-ated by human embodiment, as in much Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and allied thought. Still, both Western and Eastern cultural discourse, no less than Afri-can or indigenous Australian, distinguishes among kinds or levels of being. Since humans across cultures experience thought as incorporeal, and remem-ber, dream, and fantasize, it is unsurprising that separation of mental “emo-tion” from bodily “affect” would appear natural enough to be formalized in

© The Author(s) 2017 D.R. Wehrs and T. Blake (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_1

D.R. Wehrs (*) Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

2 D.R. WEHRS

the modern research university’s tripartite division of knowledge. Scholars in natural science, social science, or the humanities could think of their fields as being “about” body, mind, or the effect of one upon the other.

By contrast, twenty-first-century empirical studies reveal how subtle, mutually modifying interconnecting neural communication among diverse brain areas affects conjoined physical and mental activity. Further, just as viewing the stars at night discloses in distances of space the co-presence of different times, so viewing the brain’s anatomical structures and tracing its neural circuitry illuminates an intricate evolutionary history. Humanly dis-tinctive brain matter physically surrounds what is shared with rats and apes, while innumerable neural pathways enable complex, modulating integra-tions of sensory perception, discernment, and action. Human neural com-plexity comes at a high biological cost. Its energy expenditures increase food needs. The time required for cognitive development and the intense social-ization central to it prolong childhood dependence (Neanderthals, by con-trast, reached maturity around age nine). Expanded skulls made childbirth intensely painful and hazardous. Still, ever more sophisticated interaction with environments shaped by ever more intricate interplay between biology and sociality must have had compensating evolutionary advantages that shaped the human brain and allowed it to thrive.

Evolutionary advantage, in itself, implies neither complexity nor moral worth. In terms of ecological sustainability, post-industrial societies may prove less evolutionarily advantageous than small hunter–gatherer communi-ties. That said, human brains are complex evolutionary products of complexly integrated biological and cultural environments. Texts, especially literary texts, constitute a nexus of this integration because they externalize mental activity, first in stone and papyrus, now on paper and electronically. They thus elicit and explore “mind/body” interactivity, sometimes in subtle and moving ways compelling to all who share in that interactivity, regardless of cultural and historical differences.

Yet even after nineteenth-century science discovered mental life’s material foundation in synaptic activity, mind/body dualism persisted, as did tenden-cies in the West to view sociality as a secondary phenomenon and to make the isolated individual the primary unit of analysis. These tendencies, legacies of Descartes’ focus on solitary consciousness, Christianity’s on single souls, and Greek philosophy’s on personal well-being, informed a second dualism—the idea that human minds were products either of “nature” or of “nurture.” Developmental cognitive psychology and structural linguistics exemplified the “nature” side, behaviorist psychology and environmental-cause social analysis the “nurture” side.

But around 1970 new theorizing, informed by disciplinarily diverse empirical research, began suggesting that cognitive patterns reflect human embodiment, that without emotion’s influence, reasoning is impaired, and that affective susceptibilities and attunements bound up with sociality give

1 INTRODUCTION: AFFECT AND TEXTS: CONTEMPORARY INQUIRY … 3

judgments direction, significance, and urgency. Nature/nurture relations started to be reconceived within natural and social sciences in terms less of mutual opposition than of interactive reciprocity. Around 1990, a few schol-ars in the humanities began drawing on cognitive science, comparative lin-guistics, emotion theory, neuroscience, and related work to reframe questions traditionally pursued by literary criticism, cultural and art history, and aesthet-ics. By 2010, this redirection in humanities scholarship had become extensive enough that terms such as “cognitive literary studies” and “cognitive aesthet-ics” were coined to describe it.

Even so, nature/nurture dualism has been less rejected in the liberal, per-forming, and fine arts than mind/body dualism. In the wake of poststructur-alist and subsequent political criticism, humanities scholarship from the 1970s through the 1990s conceived its disciplinary (and political) goals mostly in terms of bringing to light or contesting the binary-hierarchical conceptual grids that “structured” specific claims or representations. Two broad objec-tives were pursued: first, the unmasking of illegitimate, oppressive linguistic and cultural signifying practices and forms; second, the recovery or champi-oning of literature, art, and popular culture that challenged or subverted such claims and representations.

These goals are largely conserved within the “affect theory” that entered humanities scholarship around 2000. Combining Gilles Deleuze’s neo-Nietzschean strain of poststructuralist thought with Eve Sedgwick’s develop-ment of queer theory, “affect theory,” unlike other forms of interdisciplinary theorizing and research, tends to accord “affect” a role akin to that played by language in 1970s poststructuralist theory and by decentered or resistant sub-jectivity in 1980s–1990s political criticism. Affect is treated as the prime site or engine of liberating subversion, or as the place where oppressive “nurtur-ing” does its work. By contrast, neurocognitive and evolutionary criticism sit-uates affect within contexts of “nature/nurture” mutual modifications. Still, for both discourses, affect denotes sensations, intensities, valences, attune-ments, dissonances, and interior movements shaped by pressures, energies, and affiliations embedded within or made part of diverse forms of embodied human life.

Recent inquiries into affect’s contexts and ambiguities continue explora-tions of entanglements of heart, mind, and spirit reaching back to ancient epic. This introduction’s next two sections sketch historical contexts informing contemporary inquiry. A brief account of how neurocognitive- evolutionary studies and affect theory engage those contexts follows.