affect – 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

Love as Critique

by webwitchMarch 14, 2021May 17, 2022UncategorizedLeave a Comment

In this episode Saronik talks to Manasvin Rajagopalan about critical possibilities in varied literary ideations of love.

Manasvin mentions Hannah Arendt’s concept of love as destruction, the concepts of Puram and Akam in classical Tamil poetics, Moliere’s comedies, Plato’s Symposium, the Hebrew Bible, Sappho’s poetry, the story of Shakuntala, and The Aeneid.

Manasvin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis , where he writes about questions of identity and world building in Early Modern French and Tamil literature.

Image: An eighteenth century representation of the Dhanasri Ragini held by The Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain artwork.

Music used in promotional material: “The Flute in a Barrel” by Sandro Marinoni and Stefano Roncarolo.

Tagged : aesthetics / affect / classical literature / emotion / indian aesthetics / indian poetics / philosophy of love / poetics