Literary and Critical Theory最新文献

{"title":"Crip Theory","authors":"R. Mcruer","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0109","url":null,"abstract":"Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all. Cripping offers a critical process, considering how certain bodily or mental experiences, in whatever location or period, have been marginalized or invisibilized, made pathological or deviant. Within queer theory, crip theory thus perhaps has its deepest affinity with queer of color critique, with its attention not just to substantive identities but also to processes of racialization and gendering that pathologize or make aberrant particular groups. Queer theory, queer of color critique, and crip theory, moreover, often combine studies that focus on a macrolevel recognition of the complex workings of political economy (neoliberal capitalism, in particular) and the seemingly microlevel vicissitudes of identity, embodiment, or desire.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125829724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charles Sanders Peirce","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0118","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Sanders Peirce (b. 1839–d. 1914) was a polymath who contributed many insights to diverse sciences, from cartography to photometry, from mathematics to metaphysics, and from linguistics to psychology. His fields of philosophical interest cover logic, ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, history, and the philosophy of religion. Today, he is recognized as the founder of the philosophy of pragmatism. Besides being a scientist, logician, and philosopher, Peirce is the patron of modern semiotics, which is the core of his philosophical system. Logic conceived as semiotics, and semiosis, defined as the agency of the sign, are key concepts of his philosophical architecture. The sign, in turn, is a synonym of thought, mind, and continuity. Semiotics, according to Peirce, is founded on phenomenology, whose three universal categories are at the root of his philosophical system. Logic or semiotics is not isolated but coordinated within two other normative sciences, ethics and aesthetics, which guide human ideals. The interconnections between these three branches of philosophy are essential to Peirce’s evolutionary pragmatism. Peirce’s insistence on the principle of continuity as well as evolutionism tout court lies in the two cornerstones of his metaphysics, synechism, the doctrine of continuity, and its complementary opposite, tychism, the doctrine of absolute chance. In the philosophy of science, his corresponding doctrine is the one of fallibilism, which postulates that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims in a continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy. Fortunately, the times when Peirce’s originality was considered a symptom of incoherence have passed. Years of competent scholarship testify to the contemporary relevance of his genius.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127950564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Boris Tomashevsky","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0117","url":null,"abstract":"Boris Tomashevsky (b. 1890–d. 1957) was a Russian Formalist literary scholar, verse theorist, academic editor, historian of Russian literature and Russian-French literary relations, and scholar of Pushkin’s life and work. A mathematician and engineer by education (he studied mathematical statistics and electrical engineering at the Montefiore Institute of the University of Liège, Belgium, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where he also audited courses on literature), he pioneered a new statistical-probabilistic approach to the study of verse. Tomashevsky participated in the activities of two groups associated with the Russian Formalists: the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka, OPOIaZ), and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (Moskovskii Lingvisticheskii Kruzhok, MLK). Born in Saint Petersburg, Tomashevsky produced a significant part of his research on Russian verse in Moscow, where he lived from 1918 to the end of 1920 (after coming back from the fronts of the First World War), and presented the results at meetings of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. In 1919, following the proposal made by the first president of the MLK, Roman Jakobson, Tomashevsky was elected a full member of the Circle. His quantitative verse studies from the Moscow period were, however, published as a separate collection as late as 1929 in Leningrad (former Saint Petersburg/Petrograd). In 1921 Tomashevsky left Moscow for Petrograd and joined OPOIaZ. He started working in the Pushkin House (the Institute of Russian Literature), and giving lectures at the State Institute of the History of Arts and, from 1924, at Leningrad University (professor from 1942). In the 1920s he published a treatise on Russian vesification, a compendium of Formalist poetics, and a textbook on the same subject. Due to “the external pressure” (his own words)—the official anti-Formalist policy started in 1931—Tomashevsky abandoned verse studies and poetics and focused on Pushkin’s biography and textology (a term he coined in the mid-1920s), as well as the research of Pushkin’s interests in French literature. As a “textologist” (textual analyst), he became one of the partisans of a new (“layer-by-layer”) method of transcribing manuscripts in critical editions that he championed both in theory and in practice. In 1948 he became the head of the Pushkin House’s Manuscript Department. Tomashevsky mostly escaped anti-Formalist purges, but his works in the field of comparative literature were officially condemned during the anti-comparativist campaign of 1948–1949. He returned to the study of verse only at the end of life.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"132 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116013845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cleanth Brooks","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0112","url":null,"abstract":"Cleanth Brooks (b. 1906–d. 1994), after T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, was arguably among the most influential modern literary critics. He is commonly identified as the representative American “New Critic,” who was subject accordingly both to high praise and to relentless attack through nearly seven decades. The son of a Methodist minister, Brooks studied at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford, having close and lasting associations with Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, subsequently accepting faculty positions at LSU and Yale. He presents, in this regard, a unique problem: critical appraisals of his work are commonly embedded in arguments over New Criticism as if it were a coherent “movement”—a point of view Brooks resisted consistently, but with civilized skepticism. Brooks had no explicit ambitions of being a system-building theorist, nor any eagerness to adopt or take up theoretical enterprises advanced by others also identified as “New Critics.” In this tendency he was prescient: virtually all explicit New Critical theoretical claims have proved to be unsustainable or seriously controversial (Cf. Searle 2005 and Schryer 2012 [both cited under Critical Background and Summaries]). Mentions of Brooks are abundant, but focused studies of his writing are surprisingly rare. His frequent complaints that his positions had been misrepresented had the ironic consequence that he appeared to be the de facto defender of New Criticism, because he replied to complaints in detail. Brooks as a colleague (see especially Grimshaw 1998 [cited under Critical Background and Summaries]) was most effective in shaping university literature programs and modeling critical practices, affecting almost all areas of professional disciplinary concern. Brooks was intent on the teaching of literature “as literature,” refining strategies of “close reading” through publications of textbooks, essays, literary history, studies of major authors, and textual scholarship and lectures, always accompanied by professional and public service, as part of the rise of “New Criticism” to dominance, but also grounding English departments as central to humanities education. The complication is Brooks’s ambivalence as to whether comprehensive theoretical systems, including proposals by other New Critics, were compatible with the reflective nature of literature itself. After the 1970s, the fracturing of the loose professional and disciplinary consensus that New Criticism had come to represent, and the crisis-laden proliferation of “newer” approaches and theories supplementing, supplanting, or replacing New Criticism, severely complicated inherited or traditional views of what “theory” in criticism should be, driven in part by the impetus of progress. The vitality and endurance of Brooks’s career—and the theoretical ambiguity of “New Criticism”—lies in his conviction that literature was an essentially civilizing and moral force, dependent less on doctrine than imaginative discovery through r","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126808844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alain Badiou","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0110","url":null,"abstract":"Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is a leading French philosopher and European intellectual. He is the former chair of philosophy and emeritus professor at the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most prestigious and well-known graduate schools. His thought and political commitments, which revolve around a renewed idea of communism, were shaped by the student uprisings in France in 1968. A playwright, novelist, mathematician, and political activist, he is the author of hundreds of publications, which include novels, plays, pamphlets, criticism, political writings, and works of philosophy. Much of his earlier work focuses on the implications and consequences of the uprisings, which he submits to philosophical analysis and mathematical formalization to develop a materialist theory of the subject. Badiou achieved international prominence, however, with the publication of Being and Event, in which he grounds the question of being in mathematics, specifically set theory. His use of mathematics as a way to address the main questions of ontology—combined with meditations on art, science, politics, and love— provides the backbone of his philosophy. Badiou’s project, then, can generally be understood as focused on developing a theory of being, truth, and the subject, though in hindsight it is the question of truth, or truths, that constitutes its trajectory. Like many contemporary philosophers, Badiou, rather than considering being in light of unity or the one, considers it in terms of difference and multiplicity, whose relational organization can be grasped via formal, mathematical operations. Ontology, however, mainly serves in Badiou’s thought as a vehicle for thinking the event, or what is not being qua being. An event ruptures being, introducing novelty to closed situations or worlds. Although such events are rare, they instigate the creation of subjects who, in fidelity to an event, construct unexpected, novel truths. Following on his reading of Plato, who remains a constant inspiration for his philosophy, Badiou claims that truths can be produced in four domains: art, science, politics, and love. Philosophy, in this sense, does not produce truths but, rather, thinks them and their interrelation. Art, science, politics, and love are thus the raw materials for thought or, as he refers to them, the conditions for philosophy. The following article provides an overview of the main features of Badiou’s philosophy, including main primary texts, general overviews, anthologies, and a discussion of secondary literature related to the four conditions of philosophy. The concluding section focuses on religion, as an area that has generated a lot of discussion, perhaps against Badiou’s intent.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131101616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cosmopolitanism","authors":"Moriah Maresh","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0105","url":null,"abstract":"Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all people are “citizens of the world” (Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, under General Overviews) and can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, with the addition of the Egyptian pharaoh, Akhanoton (“The Greek Origins of the Idea of Cosmopolitanism,” cited under Influence and Origins). With increasing global interconnectedness thanks to technological advancements, the ideology of cosmopolitanism is perhaps now more relevant than ever before. Thanks to thinkers and writers such as Immanuel Kant, Francisco de Vitoria, Anthony Kwame Appiah, and Martha Nussbaum, to name a few, cosmopolitanism and its implications continue to influence theoretical visions of society, politics, economics, education, literature, and art.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121327362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Arjun Appadurai","authors":"Mary Hancock, Elizabeth Weigler","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0100","url":null,"abstract":"Arjun Appadurai (b. 1949), currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work draws on the methods and theories of anthropology, history, political economy, and cultural studies. His scholarship, while originally rooted in area studies of South Asia, encompasses programmatic work aimed at formulating conceptual rubrics and questions to guide comparative and critical cultural studies of globalization, development, politics, and economy. He writes for audiences of scholars, creative practitioners, and activists, and for a broader public. A central intervention has been his framing of globalization in ways that privilege the work of imagination and futurity in its constituent processes and institutions; to this end, he has emphasized the mobility of ideas, images, finance, and persons and the durable domains of translocal interaction (e.g., ethnoscapes, finanscapes) that such mobility produces, while downplaying the territorial and cultural fixity of nation-states and localities. A signature rubric, “public culture,” advanced in his own work and especially in the journal of that name, co-founded and co-edited with his late wife, Carol Breckenridge, captures the malleable, contested, and multiply mediated notion of culture that underlies this understanding of globalization. This conception of culture is also meant to signal how hope and aspiration may be articulated with everyday worlds of meaning and action. Over the past four decades, his published work has encompassed books and edited collections, journal articles, chapters, and commentaries. Much of that work has derived from collaborative projects involving both original research and editorial activities, several associated with the journal, Public Culture, and with the Cultures of Finance Working Group, based at New York University. Appadurai also co-founded, with Carol Breckenridge, PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research), a Mumbai-based research collective that works with urban Indian communities who are grappling with local impacts of urbanization and globalization. Appadurai’s ideas about culture, globalization, development, commodification, identity politics, and postcolonialism have influenced scholarship in many fields, from his own core disciplines to media and communications studies, postcolonial studies, architecture, urban studies, and political theory.","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125201767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Karl-Otto Apel","authors":"Eduardo Mendieta","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0102","url":null,"abstract":"Karl-Otto Apel (b. 1922–d. 2017) was one of the most original, influential, and renowned German philosophers of the post–World War II generation. He is credited with what is known as the linguistification of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in general, and the linguistic transformation of philosophy in Germany, in particular. His name is closely associated with that of Jürgen Habermas, his junior colleague, whom he met as a graduate student in Bonn in the 1950s, and with whom he maintained a lengthy philosophical collaboration. He received his doctorate in 1950 with a dissertation titled Dasein und Erkennen: Eine erkenntnistheoretische Interpretation der Philosophie Martin Heideggers (translated as: “Dasein and knowledge: An epistemological interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy”). However, as early as the 1950s, Apel had become increasingly critical of the relativistic and historicist consequences of his phenomenological and hermeneutical work. In 1962, he presented his Habilitation at the University of Mainz, which was published in 1963 as Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico (translated as: “The idea of language in the traditions of humanism from Dante to Vico”). This book is a pioneering reconstruction of the Italian philosophy of language and how it laid the foundations for the different currents of the philosophy of language that would branch out in the modern philosophies of language. In 1965, Apel published “Die Entfaltung der ‘sprachanalytischen’ Philosophie und das Problem der ‘Geisteswissenchaften,’” which was translated into English as Analytic Philosophy of Language and the “Geisteswissenschaften” in 1967. This was the first work of Apel to be translated into English, but it is also emblematic of Apel’s pioneering engagement with “analytic” philosophy. In 1973, at the urging of Habermas, Apel published Transformation der Philosophie (Transformation of philosophy) in two volumes. A selection, mostly from the second volume, appeared in 1983 under the title Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. In this work Apel introduced the idea that would become the hallmark of his thinking: The Apriori of the Community of Communication, by which he meant that the conditions of possibility of all knowledge and interaction are already given in every natural language that belongs to a community of speakers, who are per force already entangled in normative relations, that can never be circumvented or negated lest one commit a performative self-contradiction. In 1975, Apel published Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce: Eine Einführung in den amerikanischen Pragmatismus (The intellectual path of Charles S. Peirce: An introduction to American pragmatism), which is made up of the lengthy introduction he had written for his two-volume German selection and translation of Peirce’s writings. His next most important book was Diskurs und Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergangs zur postkonventionellen Moral (translat","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116116549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dalit Literature","authors":"P. Nayar","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0101","url":null,"abstract":"Dalit Literature is at once the expression of a “Dalit consciousness” about identity (both individual and communal), human rights and human dignity, and the community, as well as the discursive supplement to a ground-level sociopolitical movement that seeks redress for historically persistent oppression and social justice in the present. While its origins are often deemed to be coterminous with the movement dating back to the reformist campaigns in several parts of India during the 19th century, contemporary researchers have found precursors to both the Dalit consciousness and literary expressions in poets and thinkers of earlier eras, such as the saint-poets in the Punjab. Dalit literature’s later development has also run alongside political movements such as the Indian freedom struggle, even as B. R. Ambedkar’s campaign on behalf of what were then called the “depressed classes” intersected, sometimes fractiously, with the Indian National Congress, Mahatma Gandhi, and others in the struggle. Ambedkar’s own voluminous writings and speeches, tracts of various social and reformer organizations, debates, and letters also stimulated the literary. This bibliography includes primary texts in terms of foundational writings by B. R. Ambedkar, Jotirao Phule. and Periyar, followed by select examples of Dalit life writing, fiction, poetry, and anthologies that have brought together some of these texts. Later sections include critical-academic texts that cover some of the contexts, history, and development of Dalit literature. With more poetry, autobiographies, commentaries, anthologies, and compilations of Dalit texts appearing through the 20th century, the foundation for academic studies of the field of Dalit literature were also laid. Contextualizing Dalit texts in many cases, the essays and books listed here represent a wide variety of approaches. The contexts invariably involve the Dalit movement; the campaigns from the late 19th century; the various social, cultural, and political associations; the rise of Ambedkar and his influence; and other subjects. Many link Dalit narratives to other cultural productions, iconography, and practices. Others focus on the intersection of caste and class/political economy and capitalist modernity in the postcolonial state, or caste and patriarchy. And some others, working with Dalit literature from particular languages, offer a history of Dalit literature in that language. The role of this literature in shaping not only political mobilization but also the social imaginary of the Dalit communities and the public sphere are also key components of the protocols of reading and receiving Dalit texts engendered in the academic and cultural discussions around the domain. Aesthetics, politics, genre conventions, influences and the “voice” of resistance, anger, and despair are part of the discussion in many essays. Others offer comparative studies of Dalit texts. Read variously as the literature of protest, sympathy, solidarit","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116942067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Affect Studies","authors":"M. Arthur","doi":"10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0103","url":null,"abstract":"Across and between political, cultural, literary, and media theory; feminist, Black, queer/trans, and disability studies; neurohumanities; critical anthropologies and geographies; ethnographic or other compositional methods; performance pedagogies; and empiricist philosophies, the notion of “affect” shifts the impetus of study toward imbrications of body and world that move at the fringes of attention, overwhelm description, or have historically been neglected. The word “affect” holds a glut of meanings in generative drift: from emotion, feeling, mood, sensation, and vibe to action, atmosphere, capacity, force, intensity, potential, or relation. Affect studies attend to those near-imperceptible, too-intense, interstitial, or in-the-making visceral forces and feelings that accompany and broker the entangled material—especially bodily—and conceptual potentials of an emergent or historical phenomenon. Affect can be invoked in the singular to gesture at an indivisible field of affecting intensities or as plural affects to give contour to specificities of event or encounter and vectors of experience. It is a rangy term that resists any easy genealogical tack, with roots spanning philosophy, psychoanalysis, and later, cultural studies. Myriad non-Western ways of knowing have long been alert to the unruliness of world- and subject-making forces beyond the capture of stratifying knowledge formations. As such, historicizing affect as a field of study hazards mistaking the citational scaffolding and circulation of a galvanizing instance of critical theory for a heterogeneity of approaches to a world in flux and wider-ranging notions of subjectivity. At base, and with political and ethical implications for subjectivity and knowledge work, affect studies short-circuit inherited representational schemes in the temporary bracketing-out of categories like cognition, intentionality, or language (as delimited from a wider field of emergence) in order to inquire of the forces and feelings that ongoingly make and are made by human, nonhuman, nonliving, and incorporeal bodies in movement, impasse, and encounter. From new materialist political ecologies to feminist of color cultural politics of emotion, affect studies rewire and disrupt configurations of and connections between the sciences and humanities, working ethologically and pedagogically to home in on the harnessing and sedimenting felt intensities that characterize an event, process, or set of relations, all the while stretching disciplinary problematics and methods. Affect calls into question the taken-for-granted status of the human and the body in science, theory, literature, and media. It is an analytic of power that takes capacities of affecting and being affected—and how such capacities are written into variously configured theoretical frameworks—as relentlessly political and informing constructions of race, sex, gender, ability, and debt. As a constellation of texts, sensibilities, theoretical styling","PeriodicalId":119064,"journal":{"name":"Literary and Critical Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131311441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}