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  • Introduction
  • Rita Felski and Susan Fraiman

Are you in the mood? The title of this issue of New Literary History draws us back in time—to the flirtatious banter of Mad Men era skirmishes between the sexes; to Glenn Miller and the big-band sounds of the 1940s. Yet mood is also very much of the present moment. The music-streaming site Songza boasts a “mood menu” that classifies its offerings according to actual or aspirational states of mind under such rubrics as campy, cocky, energetic, gloomy, hypnotic, rowdy, seductive, spacey, sprightly, and visceral. “Mood disorders” is a phrase ever more frequently employed in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses such as depression. “Mood” continues to pervade the language of everyday life, cropping up in rueful admissions of being in a foul mood or sotto voce mutterings about the moodiness of a friend or lover. And a mundane word opens out, as we will see, onto an expansive intellectual and cultural history.

We came to this special issue of New Literary History with two aims in mind. First, we wanted to investigate the distinctive qualities of mood in the context of the current surge of intellectual interest in the emotions. How does a focus on mood reframe our perspective on such debates? Recent work on affect in literary and cultural studies, for example, often pivots on a language of intensities and flows that seems ill suited to the phenomenology of mood. Moods are usually described as ambient, vague, diffuse, hazy, and intangible, rather than intense, and they are often contrasted to emotions in having a longer duration. Instead of flowing, a mood lingers, tarries, settles in, accumulates, sticks around. It is frequently characterized by inertia. In their comparison of mood and affect, René Rosfort and Giovanni Stanghellini note that moods are “unfocused and nonintentional. They do not possess directedness and aboutness. . . . Moods often manifest themselves as prolonged feeling-states.”1 In many cases, we do not know what has caused our mood and may find it difficult to will ourselves out of one mood into another. Words that occur repeatedly in descriptions of mood include “background” and “atmosphere.” Mood is like the weather.

While hoping to broaden the purview of recent scholarship on affect, we also wanted to tackle the issue of affect in scholarship. That essays [End Page v] published in PMLA or The Journal of Philosophy are unlikely to voice strong emotions or visceral passions has often inspired scholars to assume—mistakenly, in our view—that academic argument is entirely free of affect. Mood is a term well suited to capturing the low-key affective tone of critical and theoretical writing. It is often used, by Heidegger and others, to convey an overall orientation to the world that causes it to come into view in a certain way. Mood, in this sense, is not optional, but a prerequisite for any kind of intellectual engagement; critical detachment is not an absence of mood, but one manifestation of it. There is no moodless or mood-free apprehension of phenomena. Whether our attitude is ironic or irenic, generous or guarded, strenuous or languorous will help determine how we situate ourselves in relation to an object of study and what we find most salient. Charles Guignon puts it well: “Our moods modulate and shape the totality of our Being-in-the-World. . . . As the world waxes and wanes with our shifting moods, things come to stand out as important or to recede into insignificance.”2

The concept of mood thus circumvents the clunky categories often imposed on experience: subjective versus objective, feeling versus thinking, latent versus manifest. The field of affect studies is sometimes taken to task for reinforcing such dichotomies, creating a picture of affect as a zone of ineffable and primordial experience that is subsequently squeezed into the rationalist straitjacket of language.3 The concept of mood, for the most part, avoids such difficulties. Definitions of mood often emphasize its role in modulating thought, acknowledging a dynamic and interactive relationship between reason and emotion. Mood is tied up with self-understanding and shapes thinking rather than being stifled by thinking. It makes intellectual work possible and inflects it in...

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