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  • Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin
  • Misho Sarah Ishikawa
Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, Inverventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture ( Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press 2016) 234 pp.

Steele Nowlin's ambitious first monograph, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, begins with a claim that reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to both affect and rhetorical invention in the study of medieval poetics: that in the works of Chaucer and Gower, invention is mobilized "as a process concurrent with the movements of affective emergence" in culturally productive ways (1). The stroke here is twofold. First, Nowlin challenges the lack of emphasis critics have previously given to rhetorical invention in Middle English secular poetry. Second, by articulating invention as an affective force with a "corollary in affect," Nowlin reorients the study of medieval affect toward aesthetic form and embodied cognition (1). This insight is deceptively compact, and the rest of the book is then dedicated to tracing its broad critical, and ultimately cultural, implications. Through a series of persuasive close readings—Chaucer's The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales, and Gower's Confessio Amantis—Nowlin arrives at the conclusion that the goal of the poets' "affect of invention" is to "generate moments that cause readers suddenly to want to reexamine or ask questions about the ways in which pervasive cultural discourses shape reality, social structures, and individual experience" (191). Thus, the affect of invention is a formal technique, or rather a series of techniques, that generates critique within the mind of its reader.

To unpack what he means by the concurrent movements of affect and invention, Nowlin is quick to differentiate his terms. The book's use of "affect" differs from "much of the work in the recent 'turn to affect' in medieval studies" by focusing "on the movement and emergence that precede emotional experience," rather than on the representation of emotion and desire (2). [End Page 258] Picking up the language of modern affect theory ("movement, emergence, and becoming"), Nowlin also broadens the scope of rhetorical invention by moving away from "the aftereffects of initial inventional activity" and toward "the notion of something becoming, something about to emerge as a form, that is also part of invention" (22). Described frequently as producing displacement, Nowlin explains the "affect of invention" as the ways in which parallel "affective and inventional movements inform one another" (28). With emphasis on emergence and becoming, it is clear that the affect of invention involves a kind of speculative temporality. Nowlin illustrates this point in his discussion of The House of Fame: "Chaucer's tydynges are an attempt to represent the condition of being-in-trajectory without the retrospective construction of points of origin and destination" (55). As such, they are interesting as "undifferentiated phenomena of emergence that indirectly indicate imminent action of poetic invention" through "the shapes of displacement" (55). These gaps (these empty "shapes") mimetically map affective intensity onto the reader as a formal representation of precognitive feeling.

Nowlin's concept is a challenging one that is, at times, made more difficult through his own rhetorical strategies of delay and repetition. For example, Nowlin does not cogently express the slipperiness of his own project until the treatment of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women in Chapter Two of the book. It is with some surprise that the reader learns that "the Legend—or indeed any poem—cannot represent the affect of invention directly, but it can only ever gesture toward it, thematizing displacement and movement to generate the feeling that something is in motion behind and before these already-invented and already-felt narratives" (76–77). This statement adds necessary context to the earlier reading of the eagle's lecture in The House of Fame, which is characterized in Chapter One as performing "the difficult work of transforming the process of talking about displacement into a process of experiencing it, and of finally using the feeling of displacement to conceptualize affect, an imminent movement signaled at a structural level" (57). The gesture is not, therefore, a manifestation of the affect of invention but...

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