Book contents
- Affect and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Affect and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- I Origins
- II Developments
- Chapter 11 Feeling Feelings in Early Modern England
- Chapter 12 Laughable Poetry
- Chapter 13 Modernism, Formal Innovation, and Affect in some Contemporary Irish Novels
- Chapter 14 The Antihumanist Tone
- Chapter 15 Bette Davis’s Eyes and Minoritarian Survival: Camp, Melodrama, and Spectatorship
- Chapter 16 Affective Form
- Chapter 17 Subaltern Affects
- III Applications
- Index
Chapter 16 - Affective Form
from II - Developments
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
- II Developments
- Chapter 11 Feeling Feelings in Early Modern England
- Chapter 12 Laughable Poetry
- Chapter 13 Modernism, Formal Innovation, and Affect in some Contemporary Irish Novels
- Chapter 14 The Antihumanist Tone
- Chapter 15 Bette Davis’s Eyes and Minoritarian Survival: Camp, Melodrama, and Spectatorship
- Chapter 16 Affective Form
- Chapter 17 Subaltern Affects
- III Applications
- Index
Summary
In this chapter, I examine a singular instance of affective form in postcolonial fiction, which puts the body back in the body while also sustaining affect as a virtual substance, a potentiality that exceeds material and formal embodiments. Drawing on Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010) and Happiness (2018), I examine key psychoanalytic and psychiatric categories such as PTSD, trauma, fugue, and narrative memory as they are transported globally. Focusing on fraught contexts such as the Sierra Leonian Civil War evoked by Forna, the essay examines the entrenched assumptions and soulmaking politics of Western epistemologies of consciousness, offering the affect of Forna’s novels as an alternative depiction of the concrete and abstract materialities of traumatic states.
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- Affect and Literature , pp. 300 - 316Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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