After Irony

The primacy of feelings in our economy has given rise to a new field of scholarly inquiry. Maggie Doherty reviews two new books examining the relationship between affect and politics. Lee Konstantinou’s “Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction” investigates the cultural connection between disaffection and political subversion. He focuses on irony, which, he argues, is always a political feeling. Rachel Greenwald Smith’s “Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism” approaches affect and politics from a different angle. Her study focuses on the way readers respond affectively to literature. Discouraging readers from identifying too much with literary characters, she draws attention to what she calls “impersonal feelings”: feelings that exist not in people, or in characters, but in books themselves. Untethered from individuals, such feelings thwart the market logic of neoliberalism and, perhaps, make collective action possible.