[csaa-forum] Seeking Contributors Roundtable: Affect, Critical Reading and the Embodied Self

[Meredith Jones]

Literature and Affect AAL Conference
2-4 July 2014, University of Melbourne
Is it possible to conceive of affect as a critical tool? If so, does it matter if affect is located in the “mind” or the “body” when reading critically? If not, what “happens” to readerly affect during the process of critical reading?
Current debates about critical reading methodologies offer mixed responses to these questions. In their search for alternatives to the “hermeneutics of suspicion”,[i] Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus value the capacity for “neutrality of description” (18) associated with surface reading. In Heather Love’s “thin description”, an approach intended to counterbalance the over-used techniques of thick description, the critic is likened to a recording device.[ii] Although affect does not seem to play a role in these reading practices, Best and Marcus uphold “critical freedom” (13) as a worthwhile outcome of critical practice: is it possible to conceptualize freedom without the involvement of affect?
By contrast, Guilemette Bolens asks, “What type of knowledge enables us to understand a smile described by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past?”.[iii] Her book-length response positions the embodied knowledge of the reader as integral to the sense s/he makes of the text. Bolens’ conceptual framework brings affect, mind, body, reader and text into extremely close proximity, if not to say inextricability. Is this a convincing model for the critical reading process?
Potential contributors (4-6) are invited to present a short paper (5 minutes approx.) on any aspect of this topic, followed by responses from presenters and then an open discussion.
Please send abstracts to Melissa Raine (meraine at bigpond.net.au) by Monday 14th March.
 
For Further information about the conference, see http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/literature-affect-aal-conference-2014.aspx

[i] Stephen, Marcus, Sharon Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 18.

[ii] Heather Love, “Close Reading and Thin Description.,” Public Culture 25, no. 3 (2013): 407.

[iii] Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative, Rethinking History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1.

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