Introduction: Affect and Texts: Contemporary Inquiry in Historical Context

Abstract

The early twenty-first century has witnessed within literary criticism and allied fields an explosion of interest in how texts represent, reflect on, enact, and elicit affect. Contemporary inquiry into affect/text dynamics continues explorations of entwinements of mind, heart, body, and spirit that reach back to ancient epic. Theorizing affect shapes classical poetics and rhetoric, patristic theology, and Hindu, Islamic, and Western aesthetics. In early European culture, one current of reflection, moving from Cartesian dualism and British empiricism to positivism, behaviorism, structuralism, and Marxist ideology critique, aspired to marginalize affect’s agency. Another, passing from Puritan autobiography into moral sense theory, Romanticism, philosophies of becoming, psychologies of drive, and phenomenology, made affect central to theorizing inwardness, intuition, and authenticity. These currents converged in poststructuralism’s strong constructionism, but since the 1980s interest in embodiment’s relation to culturally inflected affectivity has become central to cognitive science’s linking of embodiment to cognition, linguistics, emotional experience, and significance-attribution, spurring an unraveling of self/other, emotion/reason binaries in recent affective neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and performance theory. Concurrently, a distinct “Affect Theory” has emerged within the humanities that shifts the ground of constructivism from language and conceptuality to sensation and affect. While hardly homogenous, this work collectively invites a rethinking of affect that calls for new understandings of what texts (especially literary ones) do and are.