Comparative Literature 691E - S- Memory, Affect, and Emotion

This course explores the emerging critical lens of affect in the fields of literary and cultural studies. We will consider multiple, overlapping, and at times contradictory approaches to affect, including Marxist criticism, the afterlives of Spinoza's Ethics, and feminist scholarship. We will begin by reading an intellectually diverse core of widely-cited affect theorists, considering both the questions that engage them, such as the distinction between affect and emotion, and the vocabularies they employ, including embodiment, intensities, and structures of feeling. From there, we will consider affect in conversation with literary scholarship on emotion, vision and sound, memory and trauma studies in the wake of the postcolonial and decolonial, empathy, critical race studies, citizenship, the digital and the posthuman.