Affect
Anthro 394M
Katie Stewart. 1.138 EPS. kstewart@mail.utexas.edu
This is a reading seminar on theories of affect.
We will head toward Deleuze and read some of his works. For Deleuze, affect is force or 1) the capacity to affect and to be affected and 2) a vital point of emergence where the actual meets the potential. Culture, taken from the point of view of affect, is not structures and determinations but intensities, impacts, routes of circulation, assemblages, articulations. Its outlines have to be seen not as boundaries around a unity but as trajectories of potentiality and lines of flight. Binary oppositions and contradictions become resonating relations (of inside/outside, action/reaction, quiescence and arousal, ... ).
This semester we will begin with other work on emotion, structures of feeling and affect and applications to studies of politics, the body, the senses, aesthetics, ethnicity, globalization, gender�..
There will be a subsequent course in the spring devoted entirely to Deleuze.
Books
Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
Doty, Mark. Heaven's Coast: A Memoir. 1st ed. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996.
Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Massumi, Brian. The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Course Pack
Abel's Copies: University Towers. 715D West 23rd, tel. 472-5353 info@abelscopies.com
Session 1
Monday, September 12
excerpts from novels: The Known World by Edward Jones, That Old Ace in the Hole by
Annie Proulx, Atonement by Ian McEwen
Lethem, Jonathan. "The Beards: An Adolescence in Disguise." The New Yorker,
February 28 2005, 62-69.
Lutz, Tom. "Introduction" and "Concluding Anecdotes" American Nervousness, 1903:
An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. (Intro)
Harding, Susan and Kathleen Stewart. "Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis." Annual
Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285-310.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature, Marxist Introductions. Oxford [Eng.]:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Taussig, Michael. "Tactility and Distraction." Cultural Anthropology 6`, no. 2 (1991): 147-53.
Stewart, Kathleen. "Nostalgia--a Polemic." In Rereading Cultural Anthropology, edited by
George E. Marcus, 252-66. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
Robbins, Bruce. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press,
1999. pp. 78-95
Session 2
Monday, September 19
Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid,
You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You." In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1-37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Rosaldo, Renato. �Death and a Headhunter�s Rage� and "Imperialist Nostalgia" Culture & Truth:
The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Donna Haraway. Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge. 1991.
Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Guest and Daughter" Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin
Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Limon, Jose. "The Native Dances" Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in
Mexican-American South Texas, New Directions in Anthropological Writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Session 3
Monday, September 26
Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject". Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001. (intro and conclusion)
Thrift, Nigel. "Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect." Geografiska
Annaler 86 B, no. 1 (2004): 57-78.
Gibbs, Anna. "Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect." Australian
Humanities Review, no. December (2001).
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. "Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment." In Uncertain
Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 282-99. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
Ngai, Sianne. "Jealous Schoolgirls, Single White Females, and Other Bad Examples:
Rethinking Gender and Envy." Camera Obscura 16, no. 47 (2001): 177-253.
Session 4
Monday, October 3
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Session 5
Monday, October 10
Sigmund Freud. "The Uncanny." Studies in Parapsychology. Collier Books, 1963, pp. 19-60.
Susan Lepselter. The Flight of the Ordinary: narrative, Poetics, power and UFOs in the
American Uncanny. PhD dissertation, University of Texas, 2005.
Session 6
Monday, October 17
Ventura, Michael. "The Psychology of Money." Psychology Today 1995.
Fernandez, James W. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Pine, Jason. Omert�: The Melodramatic Aesthetic and its Moral/Political
Economy in Naples. PhD dissertation, University of Texas. 2005. (Introduction, pp.1-9, Chapter IV, pp.156-248, and "Conclusion (pp.254-6). in electronic form on blackboard).
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, European Perspectives.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Artaud, Antonin. "Affective Athleticism" The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Sesssion 7
Monday, October 24
Deleuze, Giles. "Percept, Affect, Concept" and "Conclusion: from chaos to the brain."
What is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1994.
Doty, Mark. Heaven's Coast: A Memoir. 1st ed. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996.
Session 8
Monday, October 31
Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003. (Introduction, "Black Mo�nin" by Fred Motin, "Melancholia and Moralism" by Douglas Crimp, "All Things Shining" by Kaja Silverman, "A Dialog on Racial Melancholia" by David Eng and Shinhee Han, "Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP's Lesbians" by Ann Cvetkovich, "Resisting Left Melancholia" by Wendy Brown, and "Afterword: After Loss, Then What?" by Judith Butler)
Session 9
Monday, November 7
Butler, Judith. "Preface" and "Violence, Mourning, Politics" Precarious Life:
The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London; New York: Verso, 2003.
Sarat, Austin. "Terrorism, Dissent, & Repression: An Introduction." In Dissent in
Dangerous Times, edited by Austin Sarat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2005
Berlant, Lauren. "The Epistemology of State Emotion." In Dissent in Dangerous
Times, edited by Austin Sarat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
"Intimacy: A Special Issue." In Intimacy, edited by Lauren Berlant, 1-8. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Jameson, Frederick. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text 1, no. 7 (1975).
Jameson, Frederic. "Nostalgia for the present" South Atlantic Quarterly 88:2 (Spring 1989).
Session 10
Monday, November 14
Massumi, Brian. The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Session 11
Monday, November 21
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. forthcoming, Duke University Press. on
blackboard in electronic form.
Session 12
Monday, November 28
Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern
Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. (pp. 1-127)
Massumi, Brian. "Introduction" and "The Autonomy of Affect." Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation, Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Session 13
Monday, December 5
Gunning, Tom. "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (in)Credulous Spectator."
In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 830-. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Balasz, B�la. "The Close-Up." In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by
Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. (pp. 3-49)
Barthes, Roland . "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisentstein Stills."
In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 317-33. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Shaviro, Steven. Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism, Serpent's
Tail High Risk Books. New York: Serpent's Tail, 1997.
Lingis, Alphonso. "The Navel of the World." Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000.
