affect theory – High Theory

Affective Masculinities

by webwitchFebruary 27, 2023February 27, 2023UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Amrita De talks about affective masculinities, aspirational linkages with dominant scripts of masculinities, socially organized. As she expands her work beyond her study of South Asian masculinities, she talks about how understanding and loosening these linkages entails crucial feminist work. She also talks about Shah Rukh Khan.

Amrita De is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Center of Humanities and Information at Penn State University. Her research focuses on global south masculinity studies and affect theory. Her works have been published in NORMA, Boyhood Studies, Global Humanities and are forthcoming in other edited collections. She is also working her way through her first novel centered around contemporary Indian Masculinities.

Flatness

by webwitchJanuary 31, 2022July 14, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Noreen Masud talks about the unnamed feelings and ambiguous modes of relationship occasioned by flat landscapes, and the act of looking at them, in twentieth century fiction, especially the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, currently working on flat landscapes in twentieth century literature. Her first academic book, Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, is out with OUP in 2022, and her first trade book, A Flat Place, will be released by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Melville House Press in the US in 2023.

Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu

Music used in promotional material: ‘In Your Hollow’ by Allysen Callery

Tagged : affect / affect theory / description / fiction / formalism / imagery / labor studies / landscape / modernism / modernist / narrative theory / pathetic fallacy / poetics / twentieth century

9/11 Family Novel

by webwitchFebruary 20, 2021May 12, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Saronik chats with Jay Shelat about the 9/11 family novel. They discuss how the attacks (re)dynamized constructions and perceptions of family.

Jay refers to a few 9/11 family novels, including Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you want a list of more 9/11 family novels, feel free to ask. A special shoutout to Sarah Wasserman’s The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel for ideas about the state of print culture.

Jay is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he is writing his dissertation about 9/11 and the family. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Critic, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @jshelat1.

Image: photo taken by Ben Hider at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

Music used in promotional material: Adagio (mother nature’s sleep) by Dee Yan-Kay

Tagged : affect theory / contemporary literature / forever war / neoimperialism / print culture / war on terror / world literature