Abstract: This book has interrogated the ethics and politics of contemporary fiction by foregrounding one particular cluster of literary strategies. While the novels in this study draw on very diverse tonal and narrative repertoires, they all set out to provoke a crisis in the emotive scenarios through which the novel form has traditionally done its cultural work. As I emphasized especially in my readings of McCarthy (in the first chapter) and Coetzee (in the second), such an evacuation of familiar emotive experiences generates a space for less tractable and more awkward feelings—what Sianne Ngai has described as "meta-feeling[s] in which one feels confused about what one is feeling," or as "dysphoric affect[s] of affective disorientation—of being lost on one's own 'cognitive map' of available affects" (Ngai 14). While Ngai emphasizes the sense of disappointment besetting this shift from codified emotion to trackless affect, this book has shown that the production of such "after-affects" makes room for a very broad set of emotive registers: Coetzee's work, for instance, delivers a sense of embodied, creatural excess, while in both Open City and Eat the Document, a sense of disconnection displaces political hope from contemporary subjects to imagined communities of posthumous readers. Affective disorientation, then, not only informs negative experiences; by generating encounters that escape consciously codified emotions, it cuts across the boundaries of the individual and the collective that the novel has traditionally drawn and policed, and intuits possibilities for ethical and political connections that disturb extant social categories and divisions.KeywordsHuman LifeInternational TideLiterary HistoryPolitical ConnectionContemporary LiteratureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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