Book contents
- Affect and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Affect and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I Origins
- Chapter 1 Poetic Fear-Related Affects and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
- Chapter 2 Secondary Affect in Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai
- Chapter 3 Affect and Life in Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson
- Chapter 4 Feelings under the Microscope: New Critical Affect
- Chapter 5 ‘We Manufacture Fun’: Capital and the Production of Affect
- Chapter 6 Jacques Lacan’s Evanescent Affects
- Chapter 7 The Durability of Affect and the Ageing of Gay Male Queer Theory
- Chapter 8 Affect, Meaning, Becoming, and Power: Massumi, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Neuroscience
- Chapter 9 Translating Postcolonial Affect
- Chapter 10 Making Sorrow Sweet: Emotion and Empathy in the Experience of Fiction
- II Developments
- III Applications
- Index
Chapter 4 - Feelings under the Microscope: New Critical Affect
from I - Origins
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2020
- Affect and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Affect and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I Origins
- Chapter 1 Poetic Fear-Related Affects and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
- Chapter 2 Secondary Affect in Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Nicolai
- Chapter 3 Affect and Life in Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson
- Chapter 4 Feelings under the Microscope: New Critical Affect
- Chapter 5 ‘We Manufacture Fun’: Capital and the Production of Affect
- Chapter 6 Jacques Lacan’s Evanescent Affects
- Chapter 7 The Durability of Affect and the Ageing of Gay Male Queer Theory
- Chapter 8 Affect, Meaning, Becoming, and Power: Massumi, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Neuroscience
- Chapter 9 Translating Postcolonial Affect
- Chapter 10 Making Sorrow Sweet: Emotion and Empathy in the Experience of Fiction
- II Developments
- III Applications
- Index
Summary
Emotion in close reading is a coil, spring or spiral (labelled Stage V) that comes towards the end of our labyrinthine experience of lines of verse – or so I. A. Richards suggests in the ‘Arcadia’ diagram of Principles of Literary Criticism. For the early practical critics on whom Richards experimented, this coil of feeling was an unfortunate vortex from which little affective intelligence emerged: modernist close reading revealed only inhibitions, sentimentality, stock responses. This chapter explores how practical criticism navigates an unsettling new matrix for understanding the experience of feeling in reading and of ‘tone’ as a critical category. It examines the crisis of affect within literary criticism’s early disciplinary history by focusing on Richards’s understanding of ‘pseudo-statement’ and by tracing his contemporary dialogues (Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot) and later interlocutors, such as Sianne Ngai. The chapter re-considers the figure of the critic as cultural confidence man and challenges the flattening of new-critical ‘tone’ in recent affect theory.
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- Affect and Literature , pp. 83 - 99Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020