Chapter 4 - Feelings under the Microscope: New Critical Affect

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.