Affect and Attunement in Experimental Autofiction: Response Without an Event?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article juxtaposes the work of Kathy Acker and Olivia Laing’s adoption of the Kathy Acker persona in her novel Crudo (2018). It seeks to find out to what extent these two writers’ re-enactments and defamiliarization of authentic experience play with affect and affectlessness to create a countersentimental effect. This countersentimental effect is contrasted to affective display of conventional autobiography and autofiction to explore narrative modes ofresponding to contemporary cruel optimism (Berlant 2011). The difficulty ofreading the texts and responding to them leads to the broader question of whether such difficult texts can also produce what are within this special issue called response events. The article uses Rita Felski’s (2020) discussion of attunement to address the encounter with works that impress us with their “thereness.” Unlike sudden events, attunement can be “a slow and stumbling process, a gradual coming into view of what we would otherwise fail to see” (Felski 2020, 60).