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  • Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, and: Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism
  • Rachel Greenwald Smith
Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Jonathan Flatley. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. 272. $45.00 (cloth).
Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism. Jane F. Thrailkill. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. 312. $45.00 (cloth).

What to make of the recent fascination with affect and emotions in literary studies? Recent studies including Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual (2002), Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory (2003), Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (2005), and Patricia Ticineto Clough’s The Affective Turn (2007) indicate a growing interest in affect, aesthetics, and the social sphere. Yet these and other relevant works of criticism point toward a methodological conundrum: much of the work on affect shares an attention to how literature might be understood to produce socially significant feelings, yet the participants in this endeavor take up a wide and often contradictory set of critical approaches. Affective critics claim theoretical inheritances from psychoanalysis to neuroscience, and draw on concepts from seemingly incommensurable theorists such as I. A. Richards and Gilles Deleuze. Jane F. Thrailkill’s Affecting Fictions and Jonathan Flatley’s Affective Mapping exemplify the diversity of concerns and approaches that exist under the umbrella of “affective criticism.” These two works, both on affect and American modernism, both published within the past two years by the same press, and both with chapters on Henry James, could not be more different in their treatments of their respective texts or in the conclusions they draw. At the same time, both offer powerful insights into how an affective perspective might help to better understand modernity while also exploring how expressions of the modern moment might augment the murky terrain of affective criticism.

In Affecting Fictions, Thrailkill brings the scientific innovations of the late nineteenth century to bear on readings of its realist novels. Currents in popular scientific thought on emotions at the time suggested that affective registers were not bound to the specific individual, but were rather physically communicable, highly responsive to environmental and social features, and inextricable from the motions of the body. Of course, such avenues of scientific enqiry were largely discounted throughout the twentieth century because of their perceived crude materialism. Thrailkill shows how realist novels draw on these very beliefs, positioning the relationship between text and reader as one of corporeal interaction. She argues that, rather than representing the sentimental inner lives of individual characters, these novels, when read through the scientific climate of their time, can be understood to produce in their readers shared affective states that might offer a basis for the cultivation of feelings in common.

Thrailkill dwells with astonishing comfort in the tensions between the historical and the formal, and between the biological and the social. To suggest, as she does, that aesthetic works produce bodily effects that are preconscious and thus not contingent upon the mindful operations of criticism or the social conditions of readership poses the danger of universalism. Indeed, Thrailkill contends that the new critics are wrong in seeing affect as individually and culturally variable, but are right in striving for a critical approach that elides that variability. She is interested in the possibilities that emerge when texts are understood to harness affective impulses that are “operative inside all human beings”—an approach that runs contrary to much of the scholarship of the late twentieth century (82). Yet in reading works in which “emotion is being understood as embodied but not mindless; as culturally conditioned in its expression but not [End Page 813] in its biological substrate,” Thrailkill leaves room for the particularities of culture to transform the formal qualities of writing and for specific social reverberations to emerge out of affective engagement with the aesthetic (16). Paradoxically, her suggestion that emotions are not entirely historically constituted is contingent on a rigorous analysis of the period in which she works. She writes of her method, “The tools of historicism are mustered here against historicism’s antiformalism, suggesting a new direction for a historically engaged criticism that, under...

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