Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature

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About Affective Materialities: Reorienting The Body In

Product Description Affective Materialities reexamines modernist theorizations of the body and opens up the artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation. Modernist creativity, the volume proposes, may return to us notions of the feeling, material body that contemporary scholarship has lost touch with, bodies that suggest alternative relations to others and to the world. Contributors argue that modernist writers frequently bridge the dichotomy between body and world by portraying bodies that merge with or are re-created by their surroundings into an amalgam of self and place. Chapters focus on this treatment of the body through works by canonical modernists including William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster alongside lesser-studied writers Janet Frame, Herbert Read, and Nella Larsen. Showing the ways the body in literature can be a lens for understanding the fluidities of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as species and subjectivity, this volume maps the connections among modernist aesthetics, histories of the twentieth-century body, and the concerns of modernism that can also speak to urgent concerns of today. Contributors: Kara Watts | Molly Volanth Hall | Anna Christine | Stuart Christie | Karen Guendel | Cheryl Hindrichs | William Kupinse | Judith Paltin | Kim Sigouin | Kathryn Van Wert | Mary Wood | Robin Hackett Review "The best new work in Modernist Studies is animated not by a blanket ecological imperative, per se, but rather by a sense that modernism might be useful as we navigate this ruptured future. . . . This ambitious collection seeks to answer critical lacunae in both ecocriticism and affect theory . . .  this collection also seeks to reorient and revivify how the body has  traditionally been seen by scholars of modernism . . . Taken together, these essays seek to uncover how modernist writers not just represented the body, but theorized it. This collection does valuable service in instigating a conversation about embodiment and how we might read with a sense of what modernism makes available to citizens of the contemporary world." -- Timothy Wientzen, Studies in the Novel "For all of modernism's suspicion of sentiment and emotion, the authors argue, it brims with affects understood as more impersonal psychic and bodily forces. But modernists find affects in unexpected, counterintuitive contexts in which one would not have expected them to emerge or linger. Barren like crystals, ruins, corpses, and moonscapes, these contexts testify to affect's survival beyond, and independence of, the fixtures of subjectivity. Present-day lovers of such counterintuitive affective sites will be pleased by this volume's themes and approaches. . . . The arguments through which the authors of Affective Materialities reach those points are elegant, at times acrobatically so, and locally very illuminating."-- Marta Figlerowicz, Modernism/modernity Review “A dynamic reexamination of what modernist representations of the self can teach us about the way culture has defined which bodies ‘matter’ and how modern artists resist those boundaries by depicting the body as a creative site of trans-corporeality.”―Kelly Sultzbach, author of Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden “Putting the insights of ecology and affect studies into conversation and covering a wide range of subjects from Prufrock to puppies, Affective Materialities provides an impressive toolkit for anyone interested in the myriad ways that the modernist body matters.”―Brian Glavey, author of The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis About the Author Kara Watts is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at the University of La Verne. Molly Volanth Hall is Lecturer in Literary Arts & Studies at Rhode Island School of Design. Robin Hackett is A