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Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

Online ISBN:
9781501714245
Print ISBN:
9781501714221
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

Marta Figlerowicz
Marta Figlerowicz
Yale
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Published:
15 December 2017
Online ISBN:
9781501714245
Print ISBN:
9781501714221
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

Can other people notice our affects more easily than we do? Spaces of Feeling examines modernist novels and poems that treat this possibility as electrifying, as well as deeply disturbing. Their characters and lyric speakers are undone by the realization that they depend on others to solve their inward affective conundrums—and that, to these other people, their feelings often do not seem mysterious at all. To a psychoanalyst, such realizations might sound like truisms. Spaces of Feelingshows that they become considerably weightier within the context of our contemporary approaches to affects as gateways into larger social conditions. Through close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, it highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors’ representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, it also shows that the questions about subjectivity that these earlier works open remain pressing, and tantalizingly unanswered, in our present day.

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