Senseless resistances: Affect and materiality in postmodern American fiction.

摘要

Responding to calls for a more aesthetically engaged literary criticism and partaking in a transdisciplinary "affective turn," this study of innovative contemporary fiction examines the relation between literary affects and aesthetico-ideological resistances in a postmodern culture allegedly characterized by a "waning of affect." By distinguishing between affects, feelings, and emotions, I argue, critics can better analyze the affective dimension of literary systems and their environs. Whereas intentionalist critics warn that privileging a text's physical materiality supplants the cognitive with the affective, thus reducing ideological disagreements to experiential differences in ways conducive to neoliberal post-politics, I posit the punning term "senseless resistances" to connote the affective elements that resist symbolic encoding: close readings of novels demonstrate how integral affective processes are to interpretation and why ignoring the sensible resistances they generate would be literally senseless.;Our affective investments, our feelings about the world, influence how we understand and act in it. Ordinarily, we're unaware of the interplay between affect (sense perceptions and the feelings they stimulate) and reason (our sense of what's rational). But art, as an atypical social system, communicates using sense perceptions to make the affective dimension of cognition present. By intensifying our perceptual awareness, by staging perplexing encounters with compositions that resist immediate recognition, art affectively alters the sense-making process by redistributing the sensible. When such redistributions occur collectively, common sense---the consensus about what is prudent and possible---shifts.;Senseless Resistances analyzes redistributions of the sensible in writing by three novelists---Raymond Federman ( Critifictions), E. L. Doctorow (The Book of Daniel ) and Lynne Tillman (American Genius, A Comedy and No Lease on Life)---and one philosopher, Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek (The Puppet and the Dwarf), who share an interest in materializing affect in prose formations to diagnose social contradictions and provoke ideological shifts. Understanding affect's role in the production and dissemination of meaning is a vital project today, as our networked reality becomes increasingly virtual and boundaries between fact and fiction increasingly permeable. Their writings suggest how to modulate flows of affect by manipulating linguistic matter so as to stimulate communicative systems in potentially liberating ways.