Program with abstracts - ARC Centre of Excellence for

 Australasian Association for Literature Literature and Affect Conference Old Arts Building, University of Melbourne Wednesday 2 July – Friday 4 July 2014 Program and Abstracts 1 Wednesday 2 July Registration from 1:30pm Head of School’s Welcome and Opening of Conference: Rachel Fensham Introductory Announcements Welcome to Country 2pm: Macmahon Ball Theatre Session 1: 2:30-­‐4pm Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Panel 1 Postcolonial Affect: Chair: Kim L. Worthington R. Benedito Ferrao Whiteness is a Feeling: Indo-­‐
Portuguese Colonization and the Affective Archive of Skin Jessica Gildersleeve The Best of All Possible Worlds?: Cultures of Emotion in Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap and Barracuda Panel 2 Maternal Affect: Chair: Laura Saxton Elizabeth Towl “Hi thole this ded for thine sake”: Explaining the Atonement in Two Middle English Devotional Texts Daniel Hourigan Coraline, Psychoanalysis, and the Other Mother Katie Hansord Emotion and Critical Distance in Emily Manning’s The Balance of Pain Panel 3 Affective Fallacies: Chair: Joe Hughes Niklas Fischer Narrative, Empathy, and the Limits of Understanding: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K Penelope Hone Physiological Acoustics and Literary Form: the Nineteenth-­‐Century “Affective Turn” Ilona Urquhart ‘Deceit, to the point of diabolism’: The Danger of Humbert’s Narration in Lolita Afternoon Tea: 4-­‐4:30pm 2 Macmahon Ball Theatre Panel 4 Beckett’s Affects: Chair: Anthony Uhlmann Paul Rae Woe is Me: The Subtheatrical Prompts of Happy Days Russell Smith Benevolence, Eroticism and the Sentimental Encounter: Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Samuel Beckett’s The Calmative Corey Wakeling Hypnosis by Theatrical Temporality in Samuel Beckett's Theatrical Trilogy Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby Session 2: 4:30-­‐6pm North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Panel 5 Ecocritical Feeling and Literature: Chair: Stephen Harris Grace Moore ‘So Wild and Beautiful a World Around Him’: Anthony Trollope and Antipodean Ecology Tom Bristow Affective Points of Contact: Bioregional Biography in Alice Oswald's Sleepwalk on the Seven (2009) Tom Ford Can Literature Feel Green? Panel 6 Feeling Victorian: Chair: Penelope Hone Scarlet Luk Middlemarch's Narrator and the Ladies Jenny Kohn Feelings, Identification, and Difference: the Politics of Victorian Novel Form Helen Groth Automated Affects: Experimental Late Victorian Narrative Forms Public Lecture and Keynote: Heather K. Love The Salt of the World: Desire and Description in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt Chair: Clara Tuite Public Lecture Theatre: 6-­‐7pm Cocktail Reception: 7-­‐9pm Woodward Centre th
10 floor, Melbourne Law, 185 Pelham St 3 Thursday 3 July Session 4: 9-­‐10:30am Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Lecture Theatre C Panel 7 The Hounds of Love: Chair: Grace Moore Rowena Lennox Head of a Dog Susan Pyke The Circling Bush Lisa Smithies Writing DNA: How Does Human Behavioural Biology Influence Creative Writing? Panel 8 The Speaking Body: Chair: Sarah Balkin Stephanie Trigg 'A glance of brightness': Facial Expression and Emotion in Jane Austen Sean Barry Great Talkers on Little Matters: Prolixity and the Grounds of Character in Byron, Scott, and Austen Joe Hughes Time, Form and Desire: The Representation of Action in Fanny Hill Panel 9 Popular Fiction: Chair: Leigh McLennon Patricia J. Smith "Popsies" and Pussy Galore: James Bond, the Profumo Affair, and the Zeitgeist of 1963 Daniel Bedggood Utopian Desire and the Problems of Posthuman Affect Nicholas Cowley Weirdly Reading Desire, Frustration, and the Pulp Audience in H.P. Lovecraft Panel 10 American Poetics: Chair: Bridget Vincent Lindsay Tuggle “Phantoms of Countless Lost”: Amputation and Affect in Walt Whitman’s War Prose Sean Pryor Mina Loy's Bliss: Affect and Form Gavin Smith “The Emotion of Having a Thought” – Poetry as an Embodied Experience: From Robert Frost to Antonio Damasio Morning Tea: 10:30-­‐10:50am 4 Session 5: 10:50-­‐12:20pm Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Lecture Theatre C Panel 11 Material Sympathy: Chair: Helen Groth Sarah Comyn The Woollen Coat: Adam Smith’s Sympathetic Economy Beornn McCarthy Affective Labour and Field Stone Covenants: Romantic Repetitions of Job from Robert Lowth to Autonomists Stephanie Russo Importing French Fashions: Mary Robinson, Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution Panel 12 Monster Lady: Chair: Susan Pyke Gabrielle Kristjanson Cruel Desire: Narcissism and the Female Predator Laura Saxton ‘God, I Hate Her’: Affect in Twenty-­‐
First-­‐Century Representations of Anne Boleyn as Stepmother Fiona Gregory Feelings on Display: Representations of the Actress and Mental Illness Panel 13 Trauma: Chair: Ned Curthoys Dvir Abramovich The Holocaust Affect on the Israeli Literary Aesthetic: A Torturous Relationship Sarah Richardson ‘Phoebe “Never Gets Over Anything” Gloeckner’: Trauma and Productive Shame in two Comics Panel 14 Medieval and Early Modern Desire and Cognition: Chair: Helen Hickey Tekla Bude Math, Affect, and Mystical Theology: Desire and the Language of God Antonina Harbus Cognitive Processing and Emotion in Literary Responses to Poetry John Severn Menippean Discourse and Same-­‐Sex Desire in John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed Lunch: 12:20-­‐1.15pm Keynote: Sharon Marcus Celebrity 2.0: The Case of Marina Abramovic Chair: Sarah Balkin Public Lecture Theatre: 1.15-­‐2.15pm 5 Afternoon Tea: 2:15–2:45pm Session 6: 2:45-­‐4:15pm Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Lecture Theatre C Panel 15 Queer Affect: Chair: Jonathon Zapasnik Angela Hesson Of Hedgerows and Holy Relics: Queering Nostalgia in the Novels of Ronald Firbank Sashi Nair Affect, Desire and Queer Ecologies in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair Stephen Ablitt Hermaphrodite Himself: Jacques Derrida, Generic Illegibility and the Queered Reader Panel 16 Dead Performance: Chair: Corey Wakeling Mary Luckhurst Acting and Reanimating the Dead Sarah Balkin Monist Dramaturgy in Strindberg’s The Black Glove Denise Varney Visceral Affects and Disavowal in Contemporary Performance Panel 17 Spectacular Bodies, High and Low Affect: Chair: Elena Benthaus Jen Craig Overlooking the Body: The Gagging Reflex in Theoretical Writings about Culture and Eating Disorders Rosslyn Almond Exulting in Her Shouting Body: Corporeality and Affect in Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink Panel 18 Literature and the Passions: Chair: James Phillips R. A. Goodrich Wollstonecraft, Hartley, and Hume: Assaying the Passions Aleksondra Hultqvist Eliza Haywood's Laboratory of Feeling Jacinthe Flore Affects of the Perverse Imagination 6 Session 7: 4:15-­‐5:45pm Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Panel 19 Mediations: Chair: Fiona Gregory Elena Benthaus So You Think You Can WOW – Popular Screen Dance and Affective Bodies Prithvi Varatharajan Mediation of Affective Response in Vicki's Voice Victoria Reeve Bridging Gaps in Affective Space: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds Panel 20 Film: Chair: Francesca Kavanagh Laura Henderson The Film Moved Me: Emotional Contagion, Film and Affective Landscapes Nick Strole Reconfiguring and Performing Emotions Passed: Image and the Performative in Mouawad and Villeneuve’s Incendies Monique Rooney Earth-­‐Object: Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) and Melodramatic Affect Panel 21 American Codes: Chair: Joshua Comyn Nick Lord Design and Affect: Feeling Our Way through Danielewski's Labyrinths Tyne Daile Sumner The Electric Milker, The Wifey: Domesticity, Poetry and Cold War Anxiety Scott Wark The Technical Temporalities of Feeling in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes 7 Friday 4 July Session 8: 9-­‐10:30am North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Macmahon Ball Theatre Panel 22 Polite Fictions: Chair: Russell Smith Jasmin Kelaita Awkward Characters/Anxious Subjects: The Affect of Awkwardness in the Modernist Fiction of Jean Rhys James Phillips She Stoops to Conquer: Oliver Goldsmith and the Stakes of Politeness Mark Steven Not Sappho, Sacco: Communist Affect in Muriel Rukeyser’s Theory of Flight Panel 23 New Media: Chair: Justin Clemens Simone Murray Everyone’s a Critic: Mass Amateur Book Reviewing in the Digital Literary Sphere Anna Helle The Affective Performatives of Body and Sexuality in Tytti Heikkinen’s Taxidermied Animal’s Warmth Anna Gibbs Charged Feeling: The Affective Current in Electronic Literature Panel 24 Theory: Chair: Scott Wark Ned Curthoys Richard Rorty’s Contribution to Affect Studies Joshua Comyn “The routine was coming to him like dictation”: The Automatism of Affect in the work of William S. Burroughs Michael Richardson The Indeterminacy of Affect Morning Tea: 10:30-­‐11am Keynote: Gillian Russell Master Betty’s Accents: Affect, Celebrity and the Irish Voice on the Romantic Stage around 1800 Chair: Stephanie Trigg Public Lecture Theatre: 11-­‐12pm 8 Lunch: 12-­‐12:45pm Session 9: 12:45-­‐2.15pm Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Panel 25 Avatars, Affect, and Agency: Chair: Angela Ndalianis Justin Clemens Avatar Degree Zero: An Introduction Panel 26 Politics and Emotion: Chair: Clara Tuite Emily Direen Anxious Vessels: Unruly Affect and the Figure of the Child in Post-­‐9/11 Fiction Ling Toong The Great Singaporean Divide: The Dialectics of Absenting Affect in the Works of Catherine Lim Aaron Humphrey Emotion, Anonymity and Affect in Asylum Seeker Comics Panel 27 Memory: Chair: Victoria Reeve Zoe Thomas The Siren Song of Affect: Nostalgia as a Vessel for Autobiographical Practice Stephen Harris ‘Landscape Memoir’: Ecopoetic Affect and Literary Politics Robbie Fordyce Positioning the Videogame Avatar: Perspective, Affect, Investment Luke van Ryn Dwarf Fortress: Homestead and Laboratory Lecture Theatre C Panel 28 Shame, Guilt and Repentance: the Ethics of Regret in Contemporary World Literature: Chair: Celina Bortolotti Kim L. Worthington Confronting a Forgotten Past: Shame, Guilt and Blame in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium (2013) James Meffan J.M. Coetzee Is Bad at Sex Chris Danta
Celina Bortolotti Red Peter,
Telling Whispers: Anthropotechnician: Emotions, Secrets Kafka with Sloterdijk and Identity in Las historias secretas de Marta Veneranda/The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda (1997) 9 Session 10: 2:15-­‐3:45pm Macmahon Ball Theatre North Lecture Theatre South Lecture Theatre Lecture Theatre C Panel 29 Gothic: Chair: Sarah Comyn Francesca Kavanagh Fast Cars and Classic Literature: Innocent and Guilty Pleasures in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga Ashleigh Pyke ‘Subjects of thought furnish not sufficient employment in solitude’: Gothic Sociability, Eighteenth-­‐Century Reading and the Affective Turn Leigh McLennon Burial, Language and Postcolonial Trauma: Reading Gothic Melancholia in Last of the Mohicans Panel 30 Queer Reading: Chair: Patricia J. Smith Peta Mayer Recovering Affect, Sensuality and the Backwards Turn by Staging the Performance of the Aesthete in Anita Brookner’s A Misalliance (1986) Anna Westbrook Relational Jouissance and the Erotics of Reading Queerly, or: “Something Like Orgasm Accompanied By Crying”? Jonathon Zapasnik The Event of Sexuality: (Un)Reading Eric Michaels’ Unbecoming Panel 31 Twentieth Century Novel: Chair: Tyne Sumner Tamlyn Avery Disaffected Youth: Consumerism and the Early “Waning of Affect” in the American Bildungsroman Kate Montague Tragic Affect and the Postwar American Novel Anthony Uhlmann Intertextuality and the Sense of Truth in Coetzee’s Dusklands Panel 32 Roundtable on Affect, Critical Reading, and the Embodied Self: Chair: Antonina Harbus Melissa Raine Affect, Critical Reading and the Embodied Self Helen Hickey The Authority of Tears Michael Richardson Escaping the
Problem of Judgment
Afternoon Tea: 3:45-­‐4:15pm Closing Roundtable: Heather Love, Sharon Marcus & Gillian Russell Chair: Corey Wakeling Macmahon Ball Theatre: 4:15-­‐5:15pm AGM – Macmahon Ball Theatre (all welcome): 5.15pm Tsubu for Drinks from 5.15pm 10 Keynote Abstracts Heather K. Love
(R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania)
The Salt of the World: Desire and Description in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt
In this presentation, I reconsider Patricia Highsmith’s realism by framing it in the context of practices of observation and description in postwar U.S. social science. In my current book project, Reading as a Social Science, I consider microanalytic accounts of interior experience undertaken by linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and sociologists alongside “observational” practices in the modern novel. Setting these representational practices side by side allows me to challenge the close association of the novel with accounts of deep or occult subjective experience, suggesting that a range of Cold War novelists sought to consider human interaction—in the words of Walker Percy—
as “an empirical happening.” This presentation focuses on Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, considering her meticulous construction of “small worlds” like the lunchroom of Frankenberg’s department store or the lobby of a roadside motel. Challenging the sharp divide that critics have posited between this early lesbian romance and Highsmith’s later thrillers (read as uniformly bleak and ironic), I suggest that we can read a practice of observational realism—here animated by desire—across the body of her work. I use this reading as the occasion to consider affect studies as a descriptive (rather than speculative or structural) practice. Heather Love is the R. Jean Brownlee Term Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include gender studies and queer theory, modernism and modernity, affect studies, disability studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, sociology and literature, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the co-­‐editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?"). She is working on projects on reading methods in literary studies, comparative social stigma, and pedagogy and mentorship in queer studies. In 2014-­‐2015, she will be the Stanley Kelley, Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton. 11 Sharon Marcus (Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University) Celebrity 2.0: The Case of Marina Abramovic How have social media changed celebrity and fandom? Using the case study of Marina Abramović, whose 2010 live performance at the Museum of Modern Art catapulted her into celebrity, "Celebrity 2.0" presents four theses about celebrity in order to identify which features of modern celebrity have remained fairly constant for over a century and which have been significantly altered by the advent of digital media. What kinds of affect do celebrities like Abramović trigger in fans, and what do fans want from celebrities? Sharon Marcus specializes in nineteenth-­‐century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-­‐century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-­‐century theater and performance. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-­‐Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999), which received an honorable mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature, and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: 2007), which has been translated into Spanish and won the Perkins Prize for best study of narrative, the Albion prize for best book on Britain after 1800, the Alan Bray Memorial award for best book in queer studies, a Lambda Literary award for best book in LGBT studies. With Stephen Best, she recently edited a special issue of Representations on “The Way We Read Now.” Recent publications include essays in PMLA, Victorian Studies,Social Research, Theatre Survey, The Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature, and The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. The recipient of Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and ACLS fellowships, and, at Columbia, a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award, she is currently writing a book about theatrical celebrity in the nineteenth century. 12 Gillian Russell (Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne) Master Betty’s Accents: Affect, Celebrity and the Irish Voice on the Romantic Stage around 1800 The sensation of 1804-­‐5 in Britain and Ireland was the child actor William Henry West Betty (1791-­‐1874), also known as Master Betty or the Young Roscius. When he made his debut at Covent Garden theatre on December 1 1804, the crowd outside the theatre was so great that soldiers had to be deployed to control it; inside men and women clambered over each other to get a view of him. The fanaticism for Betty was such that the public, according to a later biographer, ‘went temporarily out of its mind’. Betty was English born but had an Irish father and was brought up in the north of Ireland, where he first made his name acting in the Belfast theatre. His fame was the product of print publicity, beginning in the Belfast News-­‐Letter, and spreading throughout the country, making Betty a multi-­‐media national phenomenon. His brief stratospheric career is an important precedent for mass-­‐media pop celebrity and its investments in affect, particularly the accentuated ephemerality of the conjunction of youth and theatre embodied by the child star. One of the most powerful aspects of Betty’s appeal to audiences was his voice and this paper focuses on the evidence of how he spoke as a way of exploring a largely neglected aspect of Betty’s career – his questionable ethnic identity. Combining perspectives from Irish studies, Romantic studies, and theatre history I seek to analyse Betty’s progress as an allegory of Anglo-­‐Irish relations immediately before and after the Act of Union of 1801 and also as a potent example of the historical voice as a channel of affect. Gillian Russell is the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is author of The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society 1793-­‐1815 (1995) and Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian England (2007). She is currently completing a project on ephemeral print culture, sociability and the cultures of collecting in Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century. 13 Abstracts: Stephen Ablitt (La Trobe University) Hermaphrodite Himself: Jacques Derrida, Generic Illegibility and the Queered Reader Commenting on Jacques Derrida’s impact on queer theory, Michael O’Rourke affirms that Derrida is “always already queer”, while also noting a perplexing “general indifference to Derrida’s work among the queer theoretical ‘community’” (2005, n. p.). Impelled by this intersection between the composition of the text and its reception by a community of readers, this paper seeks to expose a queerer aspect of Derrida, locating a gender-­‐ and genre-­‐bending in the critical reading strategy he stages beneath the heading “deconstruction”. Departing from Derrida’s peculiar assertion, written to the absent addressee of the lacuna-­‐filled novel-­‐in-­‐love-­‐letters The Post Card, that “[w]e are Hermaphrodite himself … in person and properly named” (145), this paper locates a hermeneutic hermaphroditism at play in the de/composition of his weird textual configurations, and suggests that a significant effect of the dual failures of normative notions of genre and gender to remain legible in The Post Card is to re/produce a queered reader. Deconstruction is staged as the identification and destabilisation a series of hierarchical couplings, revealing an originary complexity and an impossible-­‐to-­‐locate origin as it approaches (but never resolves) the aporia, the impassable excessive/lacking experience of the undecidable decision. Interrogations and contestations of genre and genealogy are crucial here, and thus punctuate Derrida’s oeuvre. The third key term sharing an etymological root with genre and genealogy is gender: from the French genre, “kind,” type,” “sort,” and the Old French gendre, from the Latin stem genus, itself from the proto-­‐Indo-­‐European gen(e), “produce”, “beget”, “be born”. The three terms come together perhaps most fully, if obtusely, in the fleeting reference to the Greek demigod Hermaphrodite slipped unobtrusively into The Post Card, in a lengthy missive dated 1 June 1978. A god of bisexuality, effeminacy, sexuality and fertility, Hermaphrodite is the fourth child of Hermes (fleet-­‐footed messenger, god of transitions and boundaries) and Aphrodite (goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation). Born a remarkably handsome boy, Hermaphrodite is transformed into an androgynous being after encountering the water nymph Salmacis, who in some accounts raped the boy, and the gods, as punishment, merged the two bodies together. Hermaphrodite’s appearance posits, if somewhat obliquely, a gender-­‐bending, metonymic of a genre-­‐bending, at the very heart of The Post Card’s composition, which is itself unclassifiable, an epistolary fiction about love letters which lose their way between sender and addressee itself caught somewhere between the reason of Philosophy and the affect of Literature. Generically illegible, it refuses resolution and interpretive certitude, like the “postal principle” which it performatively enacts, refusing the easy markers of genre which would expedite a closed and determined reading. The frustrated communications experienced by the sender are echoed in the frustrations, and ultimate failure, of the reader to reach their own hermeneutic destination. But these frustrations and failures are finally revealed to be transformative, as The Post Card effectively queers its reader, who comes to understand frustration and failure, this queer art, and retracing one’s steps, as a crucial to this vitally productive queer reading strategy. 14 Dvir Abramovich (The University of Melbourne Program in Jewish Culture & Society) The Holocaust Affect on the Israeli Literary Aesthetic: A Torturous Relationship In her book Nos’ei Hachotam (Memorial Candles) Dina Wardi (one of the first Israeli psychotherapists to utilize group therapy in treating the post-­‐war generation) coined the term Memorial Candles to denote the role the children of Holocaust survivors were invested with by their parents. Her seminal book explains how the Holocaust imprinted its own stamp on the second generation, unloading its victims’ burden on to the shoulders of their children and creating an index of feelings including guilt, excessive anxiety, fear of separation and a lack of independence. It was no accident that those children exhibited symptoms that mirrored their parents’ pathology. This suggested unequivocally that such disorders were transferred by the survivors onto their children, who internalised the traumatic stress foisted upon them by their families. In the 1980s and 1990s young Israeli authors turned to the subject of the Holocaust, asking whether the pen can tackle the ultimate savagery in a time and place where words, morals and life had been stripped of their normative meanings. In the process, taboos were shattered and boundaries crossed. This generational shift marked the beginning of ‘Second-­‐Generation Shoah writing’, led by authors who were not part of the ‘Concentrationary Universe’, but for whom the Holocaust was still very much part of their being. At the heart of this paper, is a wide-­‐angle examination of second-­‐
generation narratives and their language of feeling, exploring how Israeli authors have been re-­‐imagining and rewriting Holocaust memories. The presentation will look at how these stories not only uncover and describe the deep residue of damage that fills the lives of the inheritors of the Holocaust generation, but also depict the social and psychological pain suffered by those descendants who have become the torch carries of Shoah memories. Moreover, the paper will examine the authors’ operating motifs and literary stratagems in portraying the Israeli public’s emotion, and the anguished memories resonating perpetually through the fractured soul of the Israeli and the Jewish nation. Rosslyn Almond (Australian Catholic University) Exulting in Her Shouting Body: Corporeality and Affect in Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink Fiona McGregor’s novel of 2010, Indelible Ink follows Marie King’s shift from apathetic affluence to deliberate deviance, to self-­‐discovery and, ultimately, self-­‐acceptance. The novel features tattoos, alcohol and suicide, yet is set in Sydney’s opulent Mosman and features a fifty-­‐nine year old female protagonist. The disjuncture between the themes of the narrative and its setting and protagonist challenges stereotypical expectations, both from within the novel and without. A burgeoning addiction to tattooing supplants Marie’s alcoholism, but for her milieu, tattooing is a far less acceptable practice than drinking. Because Marie’s actions transgress the limitations of the polite society she inhabits, these actions are liberating and offer her a new identity – one in which she feels comfortable and in control, as though the tattoos have revealed aspects of self; Marie’s desire, pleasure and sorrow are manifest in her physicality. The necessary physicality of tattoos—that is, the pain associated with tattooing that evokes an inherent corporeality in the viewing of the tattooed image—means that she has been marked as distinct, different and discrete. The mien of her former peers alters dramatically in line with the modification of Marie’s body, as though her entire construction has changed because of marks on her skin, simultaneously affecting her readings of others and their readings of her. Where she views her tattoos as physically beautiful, they represent a movement away from stereotypical expectations to which she previously adhered, and she accordingly takes charge of her corporeality and the construction of her own identity. She is able to transgress expectations, and, thus, limitations, externally 15 imposed on her expression of self, allowing her to access different affective responses; the modulation of her corporeal experience necessarily changes her affect. This paper will draw on corporeal feminism as literary theory, in order to demonstrate how theories of corporeal experience can be utilised to ‘read’ both the construction of Marie’s body and affect. Using Spinoza’s conception of affect, this paper will address the ways in which affect is evident in Marie King’s characterisation in Indelible Ink. It will examine affect through its interaction with the embodied self and will argue that the expression of affect through deliberate manipulation of one’s physicality allows one to claim, or reclaim, a semblance of power over one’s body and emotions. This paper will argue that, through her deliberate manipulation of her physical self, the consequent changes in her affect facilitate Marie to move towards ‘perfection’, and that the markings on her body both express and generate particular affective turns. Tamlyn Avery (University of New South Wales) Disaffected Youth: Consumerism and the Early “Waning of Affect” in the American Bildungsroman In his seminal work, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson locates the shift from late modernism to postmodernism in “the waning of affect”. The American bildungsroman, particularly the metropolitan form, succumbs to the “waning of affect” very early in the history of the novel. This is primarily because alienation is not only a term associated with affect, but also with capital; and whilst the Nineteenth Century European bildungsroman was bourgeois and concerned with traditions of class structure, the American bildungsroman was more concerned with the effects of diversity within a competitive capitalist economy. For the American bildungsroman the pressing urgency of capital, excites a perpetual trajectory of growth that culminates in the alienation of the self rather than its achievement. This is a remarkable feature of what was to become the post-­‐1900 American bildungsroman, removing it entirely from the European traditions. This paper aims to examine the intricate and unique manner in which the metropolitan bildungsroman, as a particular microcosm of wider capitalist American society, develops from this nexus of affect and capital, merged to the point at which the latter phases the other out from the bildungsroman narrative entirely. As the Twentieth Century presses on, consumerism acts to soothe the overwhelming affects of alienation and anxiety in the American bildungsroman, those affects which were the mark of late modernist subjectivity, yet arrives at a point where all affect has been lost. A need for limitless financial flexibility overrides the need for the growth or education of the soul, utterly transforming the way we reflect upon the bildungsroman tradition. The narrative duty of this now commodified bildungsheld is to be incapable of experiencing the affects which determine a harmonious path to bildung as in the Goethean prototype of the genre, where larger senses of belonging and collective are often critically explored through descriptions of affect. As the century goes on, many authors turned to increasingly shocking transgression and destruction as means available to their bildungshelden in order to escape this monotonous realm of endless, mindless consumerism and disaffect. The paper will focus upon Catcher in the Rye, the mid-­‐century New York bildungsroman by J. D. Salinger, as evidence of the emergence of this trend of “waning affect” in bildungsroman fiction over the course of the Twentieth Century. Through the lens of Catcher in the Rye, we may establish that this trend of disaffect is one which looks back to the likes of Fitzgerald and Wharton, and far forward to postmodernists such as Bret Easton Ellis and the Blank Fictionist set. 16 Sarah Balkin (University of Melbourne) Monist Dramaturgy in Strindberg’s The Black Glove During his Inferno period (1894-­‐1897) August Strindberg studied Ernst Haeckel’s monism, which sought to bring the divine back into Darwinistic natural science and proclaimed the unity of all being. Strindberg’s study of Haeckel’s monism coincided with his alchemical investigations into the transformability of matter. It is well known that after his Inferno period the style of Strindberg’s dramaturgy shifted from naturalism to symbolism and expressionism. I argue that Strindberg’s study of Haeckel and the occult altered his dramaturgical approach to human and nonhuman stage matter, particularly the affective relations between character and setting. My paper thus historicizes monism’s influence on the emergence of modernist theatre and posits Strindberg’s dramaturgy as an inverse predecessor to present-­‐day new materialisms. Strindberg’s final and least performed chamber play, The Black Glove (1909), has a prop for a protagonist: a lost glove that travels around a modern apartment building at Christmastime. The glove moves via human and nonhuman means; hapless servants and apartment residents try to return the glove to its owner, a spoiled Young Wife, while a Christmas Gnome and a Christmas Angel keep the glove away from the Young Wife to teach her a lesson. At one point the glove travels in an elevator; thus, not only nonhuman characters, but also mechanical components of the set propel its movements. The Gnome and the Angel also steal the Young Wife’s child, the play’s affective focal point. The child is not played by a human actress: her presence and absence are indicated by clothes, toys, furniture, flickering electric lights, and the actors’ responses. The Black Glove teaches the Young Wife a lesson in humility via a network of human and nonhuman characters, objects, and reactions. The apartment’s attic houses an Old Man, a taxidermist who tries to solve the “riddle of life,” a reference to the monist belief in the unity of matter and specifically to Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899). Strindberg attempted to prove this theory through his alchemical studies. But the Christmas Angel tells the Old Man to “ponder the duality of nature” in order to show him “that life is spirit imprisoned in a body, in matter”—and to show him the error of abandoning his family to pursue his studies. If the taxidermist embraces dualism on the brink of his own death, Strindberg’s dramaturgy extends the definition of a body to matter that is neither human nor alive. Judith Barbour (University of Sydney) Found in Translation: the double work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti from New Life to The House of Life Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-­‐1882) was the firstborn son of the third generation of an expatriate Italian-­‐English family. His maternal grandfather Gaetano Polidori had travelled to England in the 1780s as Tuscan tutor to the Piedmontese tragic dramatist Count Vittorio Alfieri. In London, Alfieri produced a strikingly new kind of life-­‐writing, combining Bildüngsroman (the young man comes of age), and Künstlerroman (the artist finds his vocation). Its title, Vita scritto da esso [Life written by himself], glanced back to the Vita Nuova of Dante Alighieri, as Alfieri posed himself at the cusp of a restored literary language for the Italian Risorgimento. Gaetano Polidori married an English woman and settled into London’s cosmopolitan Soho as a translator and publisher. Their eldest son John William was a precociously brilliant, stormy polymath. Graduating too young to practice medicine from the famous Edinburgh Medical School he was hired by Lord Byron as his personal physician when the poet left England under a cloud in 1816. Polidori was present in Byron’s rented villa on Lake Geneva on the rainy night when Mary Shelley began the ghost story later published as Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Not to be 17 outdone, Polidori published The Vampyre, a Gothic fable of incest, murder, and the threat posed to idealistic young men by the soulless resurrected bodies of the damned. It was attributed to Byron, and the scandal magazines pilloried the tyro author as one of the degenerates in a “League of Incest” presided over by Byron. The 25-­‐year old Author of The Vampyre died by his own hand in 1821. His stricken father suppressed all mention of his name and fate. Dante Gabriel Rossetti grew up under his grandfather’s ban of silence. A blank line criss-­‐crosses all similitudes and parallels that a reader might draw between John William’s meteoric rise and precipitous fall, and the peaks and troughs of his no less brilliant nephew’s career. The truism that history forgotten will force itself back into recognition can be at best a rough guide. In 1848 Rossetti joined the Cyclographic Society, a group of arts students meeting in the evenings in their parents’ London homes. They were experimenting with printing and photography, contemporary innovations. Rossetti charmed them into a mock-­‐medieval artisanal guild that he named the Pre-­‐Raphaelite Brotherhood. In autumn 1849 he set off on a railway trip through northern Europe with his studio workmate Holman Hunt, leaving behind him a number of half-­‐finished poems and already commissioned paintings-­‐in-­‐progress. The first fruit of the tour was the triumphant slogan “NON NOI PITTORI” –– “NOT OUR KIND OF PAINTERS.” The Pre-­‐
Raphaelites were to clear a virtual space for new imaginings and banish from their sights the late-­‐Renaissance and baroque master-­‐painters, Rubens, Correggio, and their ilk. In Paris, Bruges and Ghent Rossetti feasted his eyes and formulated his critical judgments on those small lustrous oils on wooden panels, and those altarpieces in Northern kirks and city galleries, that bridged or straddled the divide between Gothic (or Dark Ages) works, and the grand visions of Rome, Florence and Venice in the Italian Rinascimento. Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli had copiously illustrated the works of Dante Alighieri and produced that great flowering of painting and poetry of the Marian devotion that was inspired by Alighieri’s patron saint, St Bernard of Clairvaux. He, Rossetti, would go directly to the fountainhead in Alighieri’s Vita Nuova of 1293. And he would transplant it into the dark and foggy London that was his house of present exile. On the rock of a translated new life he would raise his original House of Life. In the giant shadow of Dante Alighieri he doubled between painting and poetry, between translation and original invention, and between devotion to the monumental European tradition and the creative firmament of the restless megalopolis London, challenging and changing around him as the latter-­‐day Victorian British Empire rose to rival Rome. Sean Barry (Longwood University) Great Talkers on Little Matters: Prolixity and the Grounds of Character in Byron, Scott, and Austen This paper considers the creation of character out of excessive talk. Examining a trio of aged storytellers—the narrator of _Don Juan_, the Baron of Bradwardine in _Waverley_, and Miss Bates in _Emma_—this talk investigates prolixity as an index of individual feeling. Each of these characters is, to borrow Austen’s description of Miss Bates, a “great talker upon little matters.” On the one hand, this tendency makes these characters laughable and perhaps even objects of contempt. As Byron describes such social blunderers, they are “pestilently prolix and paradoxical and personal.” Their anti-­‐social absorption in their own preoccupations tests the limits of readers’ patience and sympathy. By the same token, I argue that their talk helps complicate our understanding of expressive individualism and the romantic pursuit of authenticity. Byron, Scott, and Austen locate the sources of these characters in their almost ceaseless compulsion to talk. Unmoored from standards of decorous sociability yet thoroughly engrossed by the world around them, these pedants express their attachment to trivial objects and 18 pursuits. Romantic-­‐era writers adopt the pedant as a persona for articulating an identity whose origins lie at once within the self and in the world. Alongside familiar romantic representations of a self-­‐conceived in sublime or quietistic isolation, these writers model character as the product of mundane preoccupations and trivial enthusiasms that eschew decorum and sympathy as the basis of a character rooted in social life. Daniel Bedggood (University of Canterbury) Utopian Desire and the Problems of Posthuman Affect This paper will consider the so-­‐called “affective turn” in relation to the representation of the human body and “other” in two twentieth-­‐century science fiction texts: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Iain (M) Banks’ The Player of Games. Science fiction itself may be considered an “affective” genre, engaged as it is in speculation and the ensuing “pleasures of the text” through genre-­‐fiction fandom -­‐-­‐ functioning as an “oneiric” fantasy domain for readers. Such a view may have marginalised the work of authors like Dick and Banks. The speculative domain of “serious” science fiction, though, is often the vehicle for critical reflection on current societies and possibilities, allowing critics such as Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin to see utopian literature to be convergent with science fiction in its affective defamilisation-­‐refamiliarisation tactics. Looking at Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and Banks’ The Player of Games (1988), I examine their concern with posthuman affect, testing the limits of utopian desire and humanity by means of examining the body and its responses in relation to “other”. I will be using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “affect” and “affected” to examine both the tactics of “cognitive estrangement” used by these writers (after Suvin) and the “affected” subjects within the texts; I also draw on Fredric Jameson’s conceptions of utopian desire and nostalgia alongside theorists of the posthuman condition such as Francis Fukuyama, Donna Haraway, and Sherryl Vint to analyse the different approaches to the embodied “human”. Examining Dick’s largely dystopian text, I will consider the central focus on “empathy” as an identifying mechanism for the human, and the putative role of animals and androids as affective others in this identification. Dick’s flawed protagonist, Deckard, is important as the self-­‐reflexive arbitrator of the distinctions between human, sub-­‐human and artificial other, coming to question these distinctions and voice the problems of human schizoid breaks that Dick theorises as necessary for such identification, especially apparent in the presence of arbitrary, simulated or mediated “affect” mechanisms in the novel. Viewing Banks’ critical utopian text, I will discuss the utopic, posthuman body, augmented and supplemented by technologies present in the protagonist’s hedonistic, utopian society: The Culture. Against this, I will discuss the novel’s engagement with the nostalgic appeals of the “organic” primitive: the embodied appeals of barbarism, violence and sensual agency that the protagonist “player”, Gurgeh, ultimately rejects. This rejection, however, is complicated by Gurgeh being “played” by his Culture: becoming the embodied proxy in an inter-­‐civilisation clash, an organic avatar in a war on the Empire of Azad sublimated to the Azad game board. Dick and Banks’ texts, then, are forerunners to the “affective turn” critical re-­‐
engagement with appeals to embodiment; yet they also speculate on problems of the scope or authenticity of bodily-­‐situated affect in a posthuman context. 19 Elena Benthaus (University of Melbourne) So You Think You Can WOW – Popular Screen Dance and Affective Bodies In this presentation I argue that ‘WOW’ can be read as a verbal and corporeal expression to respond to emotive, excessive, intense and spectacular movement moments in relation to the popular screen dance aesthetics of the American television show So You Think You Can Dance. When Henry Jenkins argued for the appreciation of the complexity and diversity of pop-­‐cultural performances in his book The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, he says, “most popular culture is shaped by a logic of emotional intensification. It is less interested in making us think than it is in making us feel.” (Jenkins 2007) Jenkins specifically uses the term “wow climax” to describe the effects of pop cultural performances, a concept, which he traces back to the vaudeville tradition, in which it was common to use a spectacular movement series or trick at the end of an act to leave the audience pleasurably speechless or as a means to stop the show as a result of the audience’s emotional reaction and applause. Apart from being an expressive response to something too stunning, too spectacular, too intense, or too emotional to put into more elaborate verbal expressions yet, the WOW as an immediate physical-­‐verbal expression, hovers at the threshold of a more articulated, re-­‐cognized verbalized emotional response. As such, it is the result of a series of emotive effects and can be read as sitting in between an affective physical response and the cognitive conscious recognition of an emotion. Considering this in relation to So You Think You Can Dance, ‘WOW’ is intimately linked to its dancing bodies, but also simultaneously to its spectating bodies and their physical-­‐verbal reaction to the dancing bodies. Performing the ‘WOW’ thus shifts the emphasis from effective-­‐ness to affective-­‐
ness, which will be discussed in this presentation by drawing on a combination of Brian Massumi’s notion of affect, Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘impression’ and the notion of kinaesthetic affect. Celina Bortolotti (Massey University) Telling Whispers: Emotions, Secrets and Identity in Las historias secretas de Marta Veneranda/The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda (1997) Shame implies an attack on the self, so the freedom allowed in fiction “can present a unique opportunity for us to examine this emotion” (Morrison 10). In this collection of stories within a frame story, much in the format of Boccaccio’s or Chaucer’s tales, a close group of Cubans émigrés living in New York successively talk to Marta, a Ph.D. literature student interested in the dynamics of shame and secrecy. Intuitively agreeing with shame theorists (Morrison, Miller), Marta has changed disciplines convinced that literature and not psychology will allow her to enter “more passionately into the labyrinths of these souls” making her knowledge more “real” (Rivera-­‐Valdés 8). Marta wants to write her thesis on the discrepancy between shame felt and the level of social condemnation of the shameful incident as such and opts to explore this not quantitatively but by compiling secret s willingly told. But if “the most common reasons for secrecy [are] all motivated by shame”, and people tend to avoid detrimental self-­‐
images at all costs (Kelly 134), why do the protagonists of these stories decide to air their dirty laundry before a literature student? This analysis of Rivera-­‐Valdez’s collection uses insights from psychology and psychoanalysis to explore the dynamics of shame, pride, identity and confession in these accounts that serve to complicate and redefine self-­‐images. While some characters seem to opt for the full acceptance of responsibility implied in confession, claiming agency and bearing its implications; others resort to the seemingly less damaging excuse, thus avoiding full responsibility and self-­‐questioning. Mayté’s proud detailed account of her active sexual role in her first lesbian relationship, for example, complicates her identity 20 as a submissive heterosexual Cuban wife and offers an alternative embodiment of Cuban womanhood; Rodolfo’s detailed account of an “uncontrollable” sexual frenzy that repeatedly draws him to his obese and smelly neighbour, destabilizes his identity as a hygiene freak but consolidates his virility as a true Cuban macho. The collection deploy s ironic humour to recreate and evidence some of the deep connections between commitment to particular identities and the social feedback that this demands for validation. It further consolidates literary fiction as a particularly fruitful space to explore self-­‐conscious emotions like pride and shame (Morrison 1996, Griffith 2003, Miller 2007) by presenting humorous but complex fictional accounts which ultimately prompt a reflection on the close relationship between affect, responsibility, identity and social values. Tom Bristow (University of New England) Affective Points of Contact: Bioregional Biography in Alice Oswald's Sleepwalk on the Seven (2009) Meditative, musical, bioregional, proto-­‐ecopoetic, sonic and topographic: these are some of the ways to describe the work of T.S. Eliot prizewinner, Alice Oswald. Oswald's poetry is inspired by sonic engagements with environments within nature – estuaries, rivers and the sea. She has rejected the category of 'nature poet' to distance herself from the Romantic sense of those that express the continuity of humans with nature: 'if the phrase must be used then a nature poet is someone concerned with things being outside each another... How should extrinsic forms, man and earth for example, come into contact?' Sleepwalk on the Severn exemplifies this poet's interest in the contrariness of nature. It speaks of ‘moodswung creatures | That have settled in this beautiful | Uncountry of an Estuary’. The poem’s emphasis on creaturely affect and the changeability of place suggests that settlement and contact in the Severn estuary (southwest England) is highly contingent and provisional owing to the influence of moon. The region's subjects exhibit predominantly unstable identities calibrated in accordance to fluid cartographies of the poem’s eye born of tidal movements. This paper explores affective registers in Oswald’s second book-­‐length poem and it seeks to outline how new nature writing gives rise to compelling forms that explore ideas of contact and continuum within a context of change. Tekla Bude (Cambridge University) Math, Affect, and Mystical Theology: Desire and the Language of God Math, Affect, and Mystical Theology: Desire and the Language of God Nicholas of Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia – On Learned Ignorance (ca. 1440) is a strange theological treatise. Half scholastic theology, half apophatic mysticism, it attempts to reconcile humanity’s relationship with God in mathematical terms. “All theology is circular and is based upon the circle,” Cusa says in Book I, elsewhere defining God as an unending line whose curvature is straightness, as a triangle which is also a circle, and as the omnipresent center of an infinite sphere. In other words, Cusa imagines God as the limit at which all language – including mathematical proofs – break down, leaving the human intellect no way to actually speak of God: “There cannot be an ascent to an absolute maximum,” he says, and “the Divine Nature cannot be diminished so that it becomes conracted in speech.” Having exhausted reason, De Docta Ignorantia is left with… what? The answer is affect. Believers, says Cusa in the third and final book, ascend to Christ through an “ardent desire” that drags them into a type of “ignorant” and supremely simple truth which is not revealed through language, reason, or logic. By concluding his treatise with 21 this rarified feeling of God, Cusa bookends his mathematial-­‐theological writing in two types of desire: “A certain unpleasant sensation in the opening of the stomach precedes the appetite… and wondering precedes the desire for knowing,” De docta ignorantia begins. It ends, having rejected mathematical language, with the “inflaming desire of the joyous, divine embrace.” Desire thus imbues language with a potency beyond its semantic or rational content: affect manifests a type of truth that both precedes and goes beyond the speakable. This paper investigates Nicholas of Cusa’s ¬De docta ignorantia in the context of other theological, mystical, and literary texts written in the religiously tumultuous fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. How is the language of proof or provability used – and rejected – by the orthodox and the heretic alike? From Lollard sermons to Marguerite Porete, and from Dante’s Primum mobile to Chaucer’s apotheosis of Troilus, how did late Medieval writers use mathematical language to reason – or reason away – the affective experience of the divine? Though distant from us, these writers ask a question relevant to our understanding of a world increasingly laden with numerosity and scientific discourse. That is: what is the affective capacity of mathematical language? Justin Clemens (University of Melbourne) Avatar Degree Zero: An Introduction Although ‘Avatar’ is the name today loosely given in popular culture to the custom-­‐
altered creatures familiar from videogaming, in its strictest acceptation an avatar is any interface technique that serves to bind computing hardware to a extra-­‐computer body: hence even the minimal mark that is the flashing cursor on a word document must be considered an avatar. Whatever focuses attention, signals location, and enables intentions to be elaborated within a screen environment is an avatar. But the avatar is therefore not only an in-­‐world representation of a user and a functional operator, but a user-­‐reprogrammer too; that is, a pedagogical practice working through granular modulations of affect. This triplet of focalisation-­‐localisation-­‐intentionalisation (FLI) is a key operational complex that can take on a truly staggering multiplicity of forms, both within the screen environment and in the — ahem — ‘real world’ too. This paper will range over a variety of well-­‐known computer games in order to sketch out some current limits and tendencies of this FLI complex by way of examples, drawing from Computer Chess, BioShock, Dragonage, and others. Joshua Comyn (University of Melbourne) “The routine was coming to him like dictation”: The Automatism of Affect in the work of William S. Burroughs In his seminal essay, “The Autonomy of Affect”, Brian Massumi writes that ‘[m]uch could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity [considered as affect] into cultural theory’, and furthermore, that ‘the stakes are the new’. William S. Burroughs’ cut-­‐up trilogy could well be understood in these same terms, as being addressed to the possibility of the (novelty) of freedom in a situation of absolute control, and the cut-­‐up technique itself as precisely that ‘expression event’ for writing that in Massumi’s words constitutes ‘the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox’. The extreme literalism of Burroughs’ conception of the word and image virus which he conceived in terms of an embodied parasitism, a conception that refuses the distinction between symbolic representation and the physical world it represents, has strong affinities with one of the chief ideas informing Massumi’s own work—that ‘ideality is a dimension of matter’. 22 But if the correspondences between Massumi’s conception of affect and Burroughs’ cut-­‐up are valid, then the conceptual difficulties faced by one are very likely shared by the other as well. In particular, if the cut-­‐up disrupts language conceived as structure, as ‘the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-­‐consistent set of invariant generative rules’, and if this structured language is in turn a control virus as Burroughs maintains it is, and if there is no essential difference between representation and the things represented, is it not then the case that the cut-­‐up transports us, not to a place beyond control, but rather to the very heart of control itself—to the very incipience of its corporeal parasitism? And if the correspondences between the cut-­‐up and Massumi’s theory of affect are correct, is it not the case that Massumi’s theory of affect is caught in the same dilemma—not the dissolution of structured repetition, but rather its incipient essence? It is these questions that my paper will address and attempt to answer. Sarah Comyn (University of Melbourne) The Woollen Coat: Adam Smith’s Sympathetic Economy Adam Smith has long been anointed the father of modern economics, but this recognition has often come with the forced division of Smith as economist and Smith as moral philosopher. This ambiguous binary, and the marginalisation of his moral theory by the economic profession, epitomises the sidelining of morality from the field of economics. The tradition of reading Smith’s moral philosophy as separate from his economic theory highlights the tradition of disciplinary dissection that has worked to classify economics as a descriptive science rather than a normative social theory. In his seminal text of ethical philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith appeals, however, to the important function of the imagination, suggesting that “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” Exploring the literary nature of Smith’s curious economic figures this paper will examine the role the empathic imagination performs in maintaining an economically flourishing civil society. Jen Craig (University of Western Sydney) Overlooking the Body: The Gagging Reflex in Theoretical Writings about Culture and Eating Disorders In the humanities, discussion in the last several decades about eating disorders since the work of Susan Bordo, Susie Orbach and Kim Chernin has tended to focus on how our body image and self-­‐esteem has been affected by visual cultural norms. Debra Ferreday, however, has suggested that the very concern to examine eating disorders in a way which relies on ‘the spectacular regime of looking’, where the ‘tropes of abjection, disgust and discipline’ are in fact reproduced, has led to ‘an impasse in the field’ because, ‘while the figure of the anorexic is imagined in highly affective ways, as an object of disgust, the emotions experienced by anorexics themselves are obscured’. (2012) In a recent ethnographic study, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, (2010) Megan Warin succeeds in pushing the discussion beyond this ‘spectacular regime’ towards the subjective experience of the anorectic. Her research uncovers the astonishing findings that anorexic practices serve as a means by which the subject is able to keep disgust at a distance. Warin concludes that ‘[a]norexia was a practice that removed the threat of abjection’. 23 The implications of these findings about the practical relationship between eating disorders and abjection for discussions about literature and the body, however, have not yet been sufficiently probed. Studies that draw on Warin’s work, including her own, still tend to be caught in the same mimetic hall of mirrors as before: in short they reproduce, as Ferreday anticipates, ‘the spectacular regime of looking’. In my paper I would like to draw on Elspeth Probyn’s evaluation of what happens to disgust in the politics of representation to demonstrate that the very turning from disgust towards a decontamination of the subject through a process of casting off operates in key writings on eating disorders and culture in a manner comparable to that which Warin observes in her anorexic participants, and that this seemingly unconscious but sharp affective turning away – analogous to a gagging reflex – is one of the principle reasons the subjective experience of disgust in the eating disordered person is so difficult to grasp by researchers, even when the researcher acknowledges a personal experience of such matters. In essence I will be demonstrating how, in the discursive context of eating disorders and culture, the emotional experience of the eating disordered person is usually overlooked. In my paper I will first examine the marked turning away and casting off that occurs in the most recent work of an influential writer whose ostensible focus is the very specific, disgust-­‐filled body that her rhetorical approach ultimately evades – the same disgust-­‐filled body whose sudden overlooking in a pivotal chapter of the book presents a serious challenge to her wider argument: Susie Orbach’s Bodies. (2009) I will then discuss how this persistent casting off manoeuvre operates in the most ambitious attempt to date to discuss literature alongside eating disorders: Leslie Heywood’s Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture, (1996) where she argues, controversially, that ‘the “great books”’ of modernism have ‘given us’ anorexia. Nicholas Cowley (La Trobe University) Weirdly Reading Desire, Frustration, and the Pulp Audience in H.P. Lovecraft Infamous author of hateful pulp horrors, H.P. Lovecraft, offered up the above as one of the strongest defining characteristics of what he dubbed 'Weird' Fiction. Readers of these tales are often forewarned that the titillating horrors that they are after shall never be known to them (lest the reader, like the characters within, lose all sense of self). Yet, we may consider that the reader who continues past this point is fascinated in precisely this narrative aporia. An aporia that serves the affect of weird fascination that Lovecraft is interested in. The reader of the pulp magazine opens its pages in search of delights, knowing full well that their desires shall be stymied, and, one may argue, enjoying both the desire and its arrest all at once. These are narratives of fascination for the failure of the possibility of narrative. One might likewise place the weird writer’s dense network of intertextual references to pseudobiblia within this understanding of the weird as a genre redolent in readerly failure. This archive of false, or weird texts then is made complicit in the same disruption of narrative to which the stories stylistically and affectively participate. We might likewise apply here what the author China Mieville has said in his afterward to Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's 2009 The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories that weird fiction of the kind that Lovecraft wrote “passes from us into pages, infects healthy fiction” (1115) disrupting, or weirding the ways in which we read all future texts. Through some close readings of Lovecraft's early tales 1921’s 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family' and 1926’s 'He', the weird reader, it would seem for the author, is positioned as one who knowingly frustrates their own readerly desires. This frustration is made manifest in both in the plots of the stories focussed on aristocratic men undone by non-­‐white, non-­‐male sexuality, and in their thematic and affective outcomes of strange suspension. Also, this frustration is seen in Lovecraft’s 24 generating of a community for the reader that exacerbates these pleasures of the perverse. Lovecraft attempts to inaugurate a style, but also the community for whom this style is to be received. This paper will position the stylistic concerns of Lovecraft's weird tales alongside a material history of the magazines in which they appeared and the readership for whom they were to appear. Arguing that escape from time, space, and additionally the constraints of consumer capitalism are only half of the equation, and that positioning the reader of the pulp magazine as one who knowingly frustrates their own readerly desires, is the other half. Ned Curthoys (University of Western Australia) Richard Rorty’s Contribution to Affect Studies The contribution of the late pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty to the affective turn in literary and cultural studies is perhaps underestimated. In a touchstone essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’ (1994), Eve Sedgwick called for a less ‘suspicious’ or cognitively motivated relationship to the literary text. At around the same time Rorty was critiquing professional philosophers in the analytic tradition for thinking they could write a veridical or denotative philosophical prose devoid of ‘contingent human needs and interests’. Drawing on the psychological sensitivity of his pragmatic forebear William James, Rorty maintained that the history of philosophy is ‘to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’, in which the philosopher tries to ‘sink the fact’ of her or his temperament, by urging ‘impersonal reasons’ for her or his conclusions. Rorty’s historicist argument that imaginative literature (a broad category that can include suasive fiction, comparative literary criticism, and post-­‐Nietzschean philosophising), is more effective in extending human solidarity than rational argumentation and abstract philosophical principles has been widely discussed. However Rorty’s wide ranging critique of the legacy of Kantian rationalism in ethical theory, and his support for the revival of virtue ethics, in part a project inspired by the feminist and literary minded concerns of thinkers such as Iris Murdoch, Annette Baier, Alasdair Murdoch, and Martha Nussbaum, is still underappreciated. In this paper I draw attention to Rorty’s attempts to enrich the vocabularies of moral and political deliberation by reviving the pre-­‐Kantian tradition of affiliating moral judgment with aesthetic sensitivity to the world as a theatrum mundi, the world as a stage both phenomenally diverse and continually recurring with a repertoire of character traits, an approach prominent in the ethical theories of Adam Smith (the ‘impartial spectator’) and David Hume (the ‘progress of sentiments’). In particular, following Amanda Anderson, I argue that Rorty’s pragmatism is profoundly ‘characterological’, envisaging a moral world based on the wisdom of the novel, in which ‘moral comparisons and judgments would be made with the help of proper names’ rather than the general terms and general principles invoked by ‘ontotheological or ontico-­‐moral treatises’ .I apply Rorty’s utopian desire to a reading of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, arguing that recent works of literature such as Ludmilia Ulitskaya’s Daniel Stein Interpreter (2006) can provide us with various affective ways of seeing that transcend the polarizing, identarian rhetoric that tends to overwhelm attempts to discern prospects for peaceful coexistence and new forms of life amidst deep-­‐rooted antagonisms. 25 Chris Danta (University of New South Wales) Red Peter, Anthropotechnician: Kafka with Sloterdijk “The true path is along a rope,” Kafka writes in the first of The Zürau Aphorisms, “not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.” Displacement of perspective is one of Kafka’s basic rhetorical techniques. In the above aphorism, which Peter Sloterdijk takes as a starting point for his recent reading of Kafka in You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, Kafka first makes his readers look up at a lofty tightrope before reorienting their gaze to an earthy, but equally dangerous tripwire. Sloterdijk reads Kafka’s rope as a metaphor for a de-­‐spiritualized form of acrobatism: “Kafka’s hermetic note can … be assigned to the complex of developments that I call the de-­‐spiritualization of asceticisms. It shows that the author is part of the great unscrewing of the moderns from a system of religiously coded vertical tensions that had been in force for millennia.” Sloterdijk’s chief claim in You Must Change Your Life is that modern humans have separated themselves from the vertical tensions of traditional religious systems by becoming anthropotechnicians—or beings that make and transform themselves through de-­‐
spiritualized forms of practice. In this paper, I want to use Kafka’s 1917 story “A Report to an Academy” to test Sloterdijk’s claim that a de-­‐spiritualized form of asceticism—or anthropotechnics—defines the human. To be sure, Red Peter becomes human in Kafka’s story by adopting and maintaining certain human practices: speaking, drinking schnapps, spitting and shaking hands. But to read the story in this way is to miss Kafka’s rhetorical technique of the displacement of perspective. Kafka displaces anthropotechnics onto an ape in order to mock the idea. Nowhere is this mockery more apparent than when Red Peter comments sarcastically on two human trapeze artists he has seen in the vaudeville theatres: “You mockery of holy Nature! No building could stand up to apedom’s laughter at such a sight.” I will suggest contra Sloterdijk that, in Kafka’s fable, anthropotechnics is in fact the tightrope, while proximity to nature is the tripwire. Emily Direen (University of Melbourne) Anxious Vessels: Unruly Affect and the Figure of the Child in Post-­‐9/11 Fiction The fall of the twin towers on September 11, 2001 was arguably one of the most significant moments of cultural upheaval in the Western world in the twenty-­‐first century. This visceral and socially shocking event represented a moment of culturally unprecedented social crisis, which triggered widespread re-­‐evaluation of notions of catastrophe, as well as social modes of being in its aftermath. 9/11 continues to function as a cultural reference point, and I argue is a crucial moment of cultural revivification. In light of this paradigm of cultural upheaval, my paper addresses attitudes towards appropriate and inappropriate emotion in response to catastrophe, as these constructs are navigated through post-­‐9/11 fiction. This paper is driven by the argument that child-­‐centred emotion—emotion experienced by, and directed at, the child—plays a significant role in the regulation of socially dictated boundaries regarding ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ affect, particularly in times of social upheaval. My paper will focus on two post-­‐9/11 texts that orbit around the figure of the child: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010). Both narratives deal with emotional unrest around moments of catastrophe. Using disaster theory, particularly Brian Massumi’s work on ‘the ontology of threat’, to conceptualise hypothetical affective responses, I will consider the impact of catastrophe on normative concepts of affective response. I synthesise this study with the ongoing literary discourse generated by critics such as Ellen Pifer, James Kincaid and Lee Edelman concerning the role the figurative child—the child as a potent symbolic 26 figure of the future—plays in the projection of collective social anxieties: whereby the fictional child acts as a cipher for social angst. I argue that both novels offer compelling portraits of what I term ‘affective revivification’: the renegotiation of emotional boundaries, and the re-­‐evaluation of social dictum concerning ‘appropriate’ emotional display. Specifically, this paper will focus attention on each novel’s representation of ‘the look’ and ‘the touch’ as a means of both regulating and negotiating unruly affect. R. Benedito Ferrao (La Trobe University) Whiteness is a Feeling: Indo-­‐Portuguese Colonization and the Affective Archive of Skin This paper’s title refers to Margaret Mascarenhas’ novel Skin (2001), which takes as its subject the dermal histories of the female offspring of a slave-­‐owning Goan family and of a line of women, once enslaved, and descended from a seventeenth century Angolan prophetess. With this novel as its backdrop, my proposed paper will seek to argue that Indo-­‐Portuguese colonization, both, remade Portuguese identity in the colonial context and, thereby, also recast native racialization in the same milieu by affectively aligning somatic whiteness with modernity. Conversely, despite this turn, and as the novel evidences, what lies below the skin – that bodily archive of what conjoins the histories of slaves and slave-­‐owners – constantly arises as a disruptive counter-­‐history. In illustrating the Inquisition in Goa as a method through which the de Miranda Floreses, as colonial subjects, could operate as agents of colonization themselves because of the presence of enslaved black female bodies, Skin constitutes the Indian Ocean as a theatre of racialized biopower that shaped the modern identities of colonizer and colonized. Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (1995) dwells on the “[i]mperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized, metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots [...],” which “in turn defined the hidden fault lines – both fixed and fluid – along which gendered assessments of class and racial membership were drawn.” Within a multicultural setting like colonial Goa, as Mascarenhas’ novel strives to represent it, not only was there the kind of racialized identificatory reflexivity between the metropole and the colony which Stoler’s work makes conspicuous, but a doubling of authoritarian power. It allowed the “subaltern compatriot” to stand in for the colonial patriarch, by mirroring and reproducing the gendered and classed distinctions along raced “fault lines” within the colony. As I will demonstrate, this was one of the methods through which race and affective power coalesced. Even as this indicates how the colonial hierarchy was racialized through a perverse multiculturalism, it also forms the basis of explaining how the Portuguese, once ruled by ‘heathen’ Moors, recast their own racialization in colonial settings. By conjoining affectivity, race, and history, this paper will extend usual readings of blackness and slavery by highlighting an arena beyond, but still connected to, the Atlantic world. In The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy describes that spatiotemporality as a highly fraught affective space within which modernity emerged, “[marking] out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later.” On the other hand, by focusing on Portuguese colonization, I also aim to underscore histories, literatures, and racializations, both affective and bodily ones, which should be differentiated from Anglo-­‐centric post/colonial perspectives, so as to centre affective bio-­‐power and the role played by gender and sexuality in colluding with and subverting such design. 27 Niklas Fischer (University of Sydney) Narrative, Empathy, and the Limits of Understanding: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K The phrase “affective turn” implies a history of affective neglect. It points to a time in which affect and literature were not deemed suitable subject matter for literary criticism. While affect has been redeemed as a subject fit for literary criticism, one particular form of affective reading practice – empathic reading – has attracted little critical attention outside of the scholarship of Martha Nussbaum and Suzanne Keen which focuses on the influence empathic reading has on moral development. This approach neglects the long-­‐standing tradition of thinking of empathy as a form of verstehen or understanding in nineteenth-­‐century German philosophy as found in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. This tradition has fallen out of scholarly grace due to the work of Hans-­‐Georg Gadamer, whose Truth and Method (1960) did for empathy as a hermeneutical concept what Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Affective Fallacy” (1949) did for affect in literary criticism. The radicalization of aesthetic thought in the work of Gadamer does away with the subject-­‐object relationship which underlies empathic models of intersubjectivity and consequently discredits empathy as a form of understanding. Recent accounts in the philosophy of mind sceptical of these claims have revived empathy as a possible form of understanding and this paper reconceptualises empathy as a simulation-­‐based form of understanding as proposed by Karsten Stueber which draws on contextual or narrative knowledge. This concept of empathy will be applied to a reading of two structurally similar, but stylistically strongly divergent texts: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983). Both texts address the question how a narrative makes the inner or mental life of its characters accessible to the reader. The paper will argue that Steinbeck’s narrator attempts to render the lives of the Joads intimately present to the reader by making their thoughts, motivations, and actions understandable as a product of the historical context in which their story unfolds. Their thoughts and emotions therefore becomes available for simulation-­‐based understanding. The particular narrative form of The Grapes of Wrath, which alternates between chapters devoted to the Joads and intercalary chapters and which situates their story within a larger socio-­‐historical context, functions as a framework within which the story of the Joads becomes accessible to the reader on both an intellectual and emotional level. In contrast, the psychology of the protagonist in Life and Times of Michael K and the text’s narrative structure challenge the assumption that the inner life of such a character can be laid open to a reader. Situated in a historical narrative of civil war, Coetzee’s characters find themselves in a constant struggle to make sense of their situation without success, which asks the question to which degree a narrative can help or prevent understanding. Taken together, Steinbeck and Coetzee’s texts give valuable insights into how the understanding in fictional texts work, how this form of understanding can be thought of as empathic, and what its limitations are. Jacinthe Flore (La Trobe University) Affects of the Perverse Imagination In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Viennese forensic psychiatrist, Richard von Krafft-­‐Ebing (1840-­‐1902), published his Magnum Opus, Psychopathia Sexualis. This textbook, central to the burgeoning scientia sexualis at the fin-­‐de-­‐siècle, presented case notes of patients in the form of narratives. Many of the cases in the textbook follow a particular narrative; patients give an account of their life through the practice of confession and the physician publishes the patients’ history from 28 prepubescence to adulthood, alongside his clinical judgement. However fragmented the patient’s words were during the clinical encounter, they were subsequently arranged, edited and distributed in the form of a coherent, structured story. The sexology of Krafft-­‐Ebing, hence, was historically a literary practice. This paper examines the uses of literature in Psychopathia Sexualis and the medicalisation of sexuality. I suggest in particular that literature was used by Krafft-­‐
Ebing to account for pathologies of sexual appetite, that is, sexual excess and sexual lack. Patients with excessive sexual affects–classified as hyperaesthesia sexualis–were individuals enslaved by literature and the associated overstimulation of their imagination. Yet literature was also an important feature for patients whose erotic life was barren. Individuals who lacked affective attachment had, in Krafft-­‐Ebing’s words, a blank leaf in their lives. Fiction had no influence on them, and their imaginations remained unaffected. The patient who read but whose affective response remained lacking was pathologised precisely because there was no stimulation. In nineteenth century sexology, as evident in the writings of Krafft-­‐Ebing, literature was pathologised as either inducing excessive passions in the patient or as lacking, as the patient’s eroticism fails to flourish, leading to the pronouncement of pathology. This paper also suggests that an examination of Psychopathia Sexualis reveals that while Krafft-­‐Ebing deplored his patients’ dependence on literature, he also harnessed the literary form to diagnose pathologies and solidify clinical judgement. In doing so, the physician’s own affective and literary labour become implicated in the description of disease. Krafft-­‐Ebing practiced medicine through the case study, yet the way he practiced medicine was excessive in itself by borrowing from fiction to strengthen his scientia sexualis. Manifesting an intimate connection between the medicalisation of sexuality and the written word, literature structured Krafft-­‐Ebing’s science; it was central to his theoretical framework. Literature was both an object of pathology, whereby the patient was overstimulated or not affected at all, and also a tool inextricable from the medicalization of sexual excess and lack. Tom Ford (University of Melbourne) Can Literature Feel Green? Virginia Woolf’s answer in Orlando appears to be: no. Orlando, writing a poem on nature, looks out his window for inspiration: “After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.” Green, this passage suggests, can be represented only negatively. Letters are not natural, and the attempt to make them so—to devise a literary language of nature—is self-­‐
defeating. Woolf here passes a grim judgement on any attempted literary mediation of the affective powers of the natural world. Or maybe not. Whatever else Orlando may be, it is also a history of English literature, and a history which, seen from our present standpoint, is strikingly eco-­‐
critical. In Orlando, climate change changes cultural history; atmospheric shifts alter the structure of human sense-­‐perception. The enduring literary problem faced by Orlando is precisely that of the literary feeling for nature. And even this sentence, so apparently unequivocal, is troubled. The antipathy between letters and nature is said here to be “natural.” Nature gets doubled, so that if nature has natural feelings, so also, it would seem, do letters. Woolf’s strong distinction between green in nature and in letters recalls Kant’s distinction early in the Critique of Judgement between green as an objective sensation—the colour of the meadow we perceive—and the subjective pleasure that accompanies this sensation. For Kant, this subjective pleasure is a feeling that is non-­‐conceptual, non-­‐representational, even non-­‐cognitive. In this, the feeling of green is like an artwork for Kant: like art, it brings no knowledge, teaching us nothing. 29 But unlike the equally non-­‐conceptual pleasures of pure aesthetic judgement, which are identifiable for Kant because they are entirely disinterested, the feeling of green brings with it a desire for its object. When we feel green, that is, we want that green thing—the meadow, the laurel bush, nature—to continue in existence. And this is not the case, for Kant, with artworks. Because the feeling of green is always “interested” in this way, it is, for Kant, only a “charm,” rather than being beautiful. It exhibits only a compromised, sensory appeal. But as with Woolf, this absolute distinction between beauty and the feeling of green, between disinterested aesthetic pleasure and affective interest, is not as clear-­‐cut as it first appeared. Maybe green is indeed a pure beauty, Kant later suggests. Maybe when we see green we see it not only as a colour but also as a reflective atmospheric structure. Maybe, that is, with green we somehow register the atmospheric mediation of our perception, sensing along with the colour the formal texturing of light and air through which that colour is conveyed to us. In that case, Kant concludes, nature does indeed speak to us in a comprehensible language of its own. And in that language, the meaning of green is not antipathy but friendliness. Robbie Fordyce (University of Melbourne) Positioning the Videogame Avatar: Perspective, Affect, Investment The avatar, as the visual link between the player of a videogame and their agency in the game world, is an important element in the affective assemblage of gaming. This paper provides a schematic understanding of the different relationships between player and avatar that videogames afford. Studies in Human-­‐Computer Interaction have analysed the role of avatars in player identification, realism, and enjoyment. Yet, while terms such as “first person” and “third person” -­‐-­‐ referring to a perspective respectively “inside” and “outside” the avatar -­‐-­‐ are common in the popular press, a comprehensive analysis of the positioning of the avatar has yet to be undertaken. This paper maps the player perspectives of several video games against the models of agency that they employ. These range from invisible, omnipotent perspectives in “god simulation” games like Sim City to blinkered exploration in first-­‐person shooters like Half Life. Three key points are proposed for the relationship between the player and the avatar. Firstly, the avatar appears a means of solving a technical problem: suturing the player into the world of the game. Secondly, the positioning of the avatar is an index of the agency of the player’s power. Thirdly, the avatar is analysed as a site of investment for players: emotionally and increasingly economically. Anna Gibbs (University of Western Sydney) Charged Feeling: The Affective Current in Electronic Literature Charged Feeling: the affective current in electronic literature Focusing in particular on Australian artist/writer Grant Stevens’ video text works, this paper examines the particular forms of affective transmission in electronic literature, with its distinctive modes of what N Katherine Hayles (2006) terms ‘eventalization’. While Hayles tends to underestimate the continuities between print-­‐based text and digital media writing given that all literary reading is performance for which text functions as score, provoking ‘probabilistic, not mechanistic reading’ and ‘producing the text ‘as an event’ (Drucker, 2011), digital media works nevertheless arguably produce a distinctive experience of both text and reading. Drawing on work done in collaboration with Maria Angel in the context of an ARC-­‐funded project (‘Creative Nation: writer and writing in the new media culture’, 2011-­‐13), which examines the way digital media works redistribute agency computer and human, by way of the work of code which is not immediately visible or 30 accessible to the human participants in them, producing a machinic agency into which human capacities can be conscripted to nonhuman ends, this paper explores the work of affect in that kind of arrangement. On the one hand, against writers like Kittler and Kramer, who regard the interface of the data-­‐processing system as ‘eyewash’, it could be argued that the interface (in this case e-­‐poetry) represents, rather, the affective excess produced by the need for seduction – the eye in tail of the of the peacock, in Darwinian terms – that conscripts human participation into new forms of creation. On the other hand, such conscription has implications both for subjectivity and what counts as reading and thought, as Richard Forman points out, describing the rise of a new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance – as we all become ‘pancake people’ – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” What then becomes of literary subjectivity, with its affectively invested absorption, as a site for the production of the affective doubling that ‘gives the body’s movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions – accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency’ and produces emotion ‘as the way the depth of that ongoing experience registers personally at a given moment’ (Massumi 2003)? Through close analysis of Grant Stevens’ video texts, this paper inquires into the way the immersive environment of video installation might modulate both the becoming-­‐image of text and the disorganising tendencies of digital distraction. Jessica Gildersleeve (University of Southern Queensland) The Best of All Possible Worlds?: Cultures of Emotion in Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap and Barracuda In his foreword to a new edition of Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, Christos Tsiolkas makes a powerful statement: ‘No,’ he says, ‘this isn’t the best of all possible worlds. We can, we must, do much better’ (xiv). Tsiolkas’s words may in part explain why contemporary Australian literature has experienced an affective turn in recent years. Appearing at once as a consequence of, and in direct contrast to, the discourse of mateship, community and pride instilled by a reliance on the ‘Anzac spirit,’ more recent cultural and literary discourses in Australia describe disruption, shame, humiliation, anger, and accompanying violence. This paper forms part of a project (a book in progress, Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopic Vision) which aims to develop wider discussion of the nature of ethics and responsibility in literature through an analysis of the ways in which Tsiolkas’s work takes negative emotions, such as fear, shame and grief, and puts them to use as techniques of cultural influence and analysis. With reference to Tsiolkas’s two most recent novels, The Slap (2008) and Barracuda (2013), I argue that Tsiolkas engages with such emotions in order to turn them towards what I term his ‘utopic vision’ for Australia. An Australia bound by trauma and violence is certainly not an idealised or romanticised ‘lucky country’, Tsiolkas’s work points out, but neither is it ethically right for us to simply observe or critique such social problems. Tsiolkas’s writing suggests that literature can play a key role in shaping responsible behaviour and a better future for Australia. The Slap explodes the myth of cultural harmony and exposes the way in which the shame game works to exclude and divide, undermining the narrative of a unified and diverse Australian community. Rather than wallowing in postcolonial guilt, as so many of his characters do, by showing how shame circulates socially and culturally Tsiolkas analyses the usefulness of shame in twenty-­‐first-­‐century Australia. Barracuda emerges from and into an Australia marked by political turmoil and racial debates, particularly to do with immigration and asylum seekers. Tsiolkas himself is a regular contributor to such discussions. In his simultaneous vision of what the nation is doing wrong, and yet 31 what it could be, in Barracuda Tsiolkas’s central concern is with what it means to be ‘good’. Barracuda constructs an ethical framework which intersects with its affective concern with anger and continues The Slap’s interest in discourses of shame. Danny Kelly’s violence and anger figure a continuation of the marginalised character of Gary in The Slap, as well as the careless violence of Ari in Loaded and the savage, bloodthirsty aggression of Isaac in Dead Europe. The paper will examine where Danny differs from his literary precursors – his willingness to atone – and how we might read this as a cultural guideline for contemporary Australia. R. A. Goodrich (Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne) Wollstonecraft, Hartley, and Hume: Assaying the Passions This paper expressly juxtaposes three eighteenth-­‐century British writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, David Hartley, and David Hume. The over-­‐arching question raised is: To what extent can the psychological portrayal of the central protagonist of Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction (1788) be analysed in terms of the distinctive contributions of Hartley and Hume to debates about the nature of the passions? There is no denying that more popular current accounts of Wollstonecraft (1788) can be read thematically as a feminist polemic or inter-­‐textually especially with Jean-­‐Jacques Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and Émile (1762), teleologically as an Enlightenment precursor of Romantic literary developments or generically as fictionalised autobiography. Whilst such relatively familiar readings may account for passions or emotions by default, this paper, however, will examine the work specifically for how it portrays the world of pleasurable and painful passions that beset “the Heroine of this Fiction.” At the same time, the passions or emotions portrayed will be overtly conceptualised by way of two dominant intellectuals of the period, occasionally mentioned in passing but never pursued by scholars of Wollstonecraft: the philosopher and physician Hartley and the philosopher and essayist Hume. Amongst their distinctive contentions are two of particular relevance. Hartley, in his Various Consequences (1746) and its partial re-­‐incorporation in Part One of his magnum opus Observations on Man (1749), postulates that the physio-­‐psychological development of an individual emerges from a series of “transferences” of emotion during the transformative process of the self and its painful and pleasurable experiences. Hume, in his second Dissertation Of the Passions (1757), a radically reduced re-­‐configuration of Book Three of Treatise on Human Nature (1739), assumes the provocative stance that reason not only is but also ought to be “the slave of passion,” thereby leading to the view that emotions operate at the centre of character and agency as depicted in the case of conflicting emotions in his third Dissertation Of Tragedy (1757). For us to enter eighteenth-­‐century enquiries into the nature of emotions or passions and to assess how these might be manifested in prose fiction is to contextualise them in terms of at least four key factors. Firstly, for this or any other period, an elaboration of what defines the mind tends to involve a re-­‐definition of human emotions and, with it, a re-­‐appraisal of emotional norms typically regarded as natural or ordered as distinct from those construed as unnatural or disordered. Secondly, there is a gradual uncoupling of assessments of emotions—be they categorised as affections or feelings, sentiments or passions—from criteria solely derived from religious faith or doctrine. Thirdly, seminal debates were not confined to an educated or social elite; rather, such debates were disseminated through school curricula and advisory manuals as much as through medical texts and literary works. Fourthly, and contrary to our practice some eight or nine generations later, the psychological, physiological, and philosophical dimensions of the debate in Britain often overlapped. 32 Fiona Gregory (Monash University) Feelings on Display: Representations of the Actress and Mental Illness In Joan Didion’s novel, Play It as It Lays (1970), an actress’s mental disintegration is conveyed through the character’s seeming lack of affect, distancing both the character’s friends and acquaintances, and the reader. The denial of feeling in Didion’s portrait is a striking depiction of mental illness, particularly that of the performing woman, a figure more typically represented through images of emotional excess. Some one hundred years earlier, Anna Cora Mowatt had signalled the mental breakdown of an actress in her novella Mimic Life (1856) through the character’s inability to control her feelings, especially on stage. When Stella makes her curtain call, Mowatt writes, her “look…was almost ghastly. Her lips had not yet been taught to assume the forced professional smile with which the suffering actress veils her real emotions.” This paper examines the place of feeling in representations of the actress and mental illness, reading the above fictional works by Didion and Mowatt alongside memoirs by real-­‐life actresses such as Diana Barrymore (Too Much, Too Soon, 1957) and Frances Farmer (Will There Really Be a Morning, 1973). It considers the status of the actress as a woman authorised to ‘feel emotion publically’ on stage and screen, and the tension that emerges when private feelings overwhelm the professional self. Helen Groth (University of New South Wales) Automated Affects: Experimental Late Victorian Narrative Forms This paper examines the early English film-­‐maker & theorist, Cecil Hepworth’s experimental approach to cinematic affect and narrative sequence. Known for his adaptations of Dickens, Carroll and others, Hepworth’s practice was not limited to literary adaptation. He was also keenly interested in why audiences felt such ‘intense enthusiasm’ for the ‘short, crude films’ that he regularly exhibited. In his accounts of these performances he tells of exhibiting films back the front and upside down to gauge audience responses and of arguing with audience members who responded in unruly ways to his chaotic assemblages of still and moving images. This paper will argue that this practice exemplifies Hepworth’s interest in forging a cinematic language that moved beyond the ‘moving images’ provided by literary sources on which he depended to make his living. It is possible to trace in Hepworth’s interest in cinematic assemblage and actuality something akin to what Virginia Woolf so evocatively describes in her observations on cinema: “… if a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression.” Katie Hansord (Deakin University) Emotion and Critical Distance in Emily Manning’s The Balance of Pain Imaginative compassion for others was considered to be particular to women’s intelligence in the nineteenth century, as it was understood to be intuitive rather than reasoned. Emily Manning’s title poem ‘The Balance of Pain’ represents maternal love and womanhood as powerful elements which recur throughout The Balance of Pain, and Other Poems, evoking ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’ and associated feminised religion. Manning brings questions of women’s compassion into the realm of the supernatural in ‘The Balance of Pain,’ through depictions of Agatha as a ‘seer’. The poem, structured as a theatrical dialogue between Agatha and Theodore, presents a feminised alternative to the emerging ‘political morality’ of rationalism. This paper will examine some of the 33 ways in which gendered conceptions of emotion and reason are challenged and rebalanced in Manning’s poem, as well as the broader significance of gender, feeling and detachment to Victorian cultural debates and female poetic tradition. As Amanda Anderson has argued, “Valorised forms of detachment within Victorian culture are often allotted to those empowered by virtue of their gender, their race, their nationality, or their social position” (5). Manning seems careful not to posit Agatha as the victor in the debate through the power of mental reasoning, offering up ‘feminine’ alternatives; Agatha is capable of ‘seeing’ into the minds of others, and intuits rather than argues. However, the success of Agatha’s persuasion is significant, as it is a victory of a feminine discourse of feeling and spiritualism over a masculine and materialist area of discourse. A reading of ‘The Balance of Pain’ as a poem concerned with the value of emotion and empathic response in an increasingly materialistic society is supported by the use of occult mesmeric trance which frames the argument of Manning’s defence. Manning overrides concerns with material injustice with the concept of female or maternal suffering as transcending class. Within Agatha’s mesmeric vision, the mother ‘lays her lace and jewels by / Rich, yet so lonely, with a sigh’ and repeats this symbolic action more emphatically, declaring: While I am envied—I! Who fain Would give my riches all to gain Health for my darling. Manning places value on the maternal as a site of love, care, and grief, thereby rejecting the cultural emphasis on the value of material possessions. As Agatha relates the close of the scene, material wealth is again presented as falsely valued, as she views the mother ‘Through silken curtains … she weeps’ (7). The emphasis on suffering and loss recalls Hemans’s melancholic preoccupation with female suffering in Records of Woman. Manning’s poetry reflects not only the inheritance of women poets like Hemans, a continuing female tradition. As Isobel Armstrong points out, as well as being a popular poetic form in the Victorian period, the theatrical monologue was of particular use to women poets as a means of examining gender from behind the mask of anonymity or multiple voices. Indeed, Armstrong suggests that poets, such as Landon and Hemans were among the first to adopt the technique (Victorian Poetry 318). Antonina Harbus (Macquarie University) Cognitive Processing and Emotion in Literary Responses to Poetry This paper considers how a modern reader is able not only to make sense of a poetic text from a temporally remote culture, but also to have an aesthetic and emotional reaction to it. Specifically cognitive approaches to the linguistics of literature can provide new explanatory frameworks for considering such questions, however, to date there has been very little conceptual interaction between scholars of cognitive poetics and those working in medieval English literature. This paper will address potential of this combination, by blending ideas and methods from cognitive science, cognitive poetics, cultural history, and literary analysis to consider the embedded durability of the affect/aesthetic combination in literary response. In particular, it will deploy insights from neuroscientific work on the role of emotion in mental processing, along with cognitive poetic approaches to the aesthetics of reading, to consider how poetic language use relies on cognitive and affective processes. For example, our use of conceptual metaphor to communicate abstract ideas is a key point of contact with our medieval predecessors, whose literary representations of embodied emotions we are able to recognise, process, and appreciate. Similarly, text world building and conceptual blending recruit familiar evolved cognitive capacities in 34 combination with culturally specific schemas in a process that lends itself to specifically cognitive analysis. To demonstrate these ideas in practice, this paper will explore the shared cognitive basis of meaning and feeling in short (translated) medieval English poetic extracts. Using the Old English elegies 'The Wife’s Lament' and 'The Wanderer', this paper will consider the relationship between mind and meaning from the perspective that the mind and human emotion are the result of the close and dynamic interplay of culture and biology. This intersection is particularly productive for the consideration of texts created in temporally or geographically remote societies, such as Anglo-­‐Saxon England. From a history of emotions perspective, consideration of the affective potential of such texts, written down over 1000 years ago in a language that is the antecedent of our own, allows us to consider the role of culture in the experience of emotions. In turn, we can pursue how that experience and its literary representation might change over time, especially given differing deployments of language, including metaphorical and blended constructions, but also how the emotional trigger works beyond the immediate context. Instances from Old English poetry can allow us to ask whether the experience being represented in these medieval texts is the same as similarly named emotions experienced by us today; and more broadly, to what degree emotions are intelligible cross-­‐culturally. This paper will argue that texts can produce emotional experiences in a modern audience, notwithstanding their acknowledged remoteness and fictionality, as a result of embodied cognitive and affective reactions. Readerly emotional investment arises from linguistic features (including but not confined to metaphoric language; conceptual blending; and text world building) to produce a literary effect, a reaction analysed in this paper. Stephen Harris (University of New England) ‘Landscape Memoir’: Ecopoetic Affect and Literary Politics In the prologue to his experiment in literary genre, The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir, Mark Tredinnick introduces the ‘landscape memoir’ through a kind of conceit: the land (of the eponymous plateau) is figured as an “essay in slowness”; soil erosion an “essay in drama”; the plateau and authorial self are commingled in dramatic form – “I am a landscape of loss”; then, through literary elision, the plateau becomes interchangeably “a landscape of loss” (4-­‐5). Later in the narrative, the pathetic fallacy amplifies the effect: mountains are given “blood” and seen to “suffer”; the plateau is explicitly given a “self” (71); and with an affective accent, the author’s wife’s body becomes the intimately felt “geography” under the writer’s custodial hand. Metaphor folds into metaphor, not hierarchically but dynamically and interactively, just as generic identities (‘landscape memoir’) fuse and blur in the writer’s striving for communicative and imaginative expansiveness. Aesthetically and conceptually, Tredinnick’s literary effort could be said to perform, or at least gestures towards, an ecopoetic ‘reinhabitation’ of place, as the exponents of the ‘bioregional imagination’ refer to it when describing the wider field of ’ecocritical’ iterature. As Tredinnick defines it in his earlier study of American nature writers, The Land’s Wild Music (2005), the ‘landscape memoir’ represents a “literature of place, ecologically imagined and written in the landscape’s own vernacular … [a] celebration of, [and] an enacted belonging in, the land” (7). The imagery of immersion is conspicuous here: such an ‘enacted belonging in the land’ seeks to effect an emotional responsiveness as the basis of an imaginative and (by inference) practical (re)engagement with the natural world. If this invokes the language of intentionality, it can also be said to represent an instance of the affective fallacy, wherein the literary text asserts it evaluative ‘place’ according to what it implicitly wants to do to the reader – the 35 reader’s felt response becomes the measure of the text’s validity as both experimental genre and a form of ‘eco-­‐political’ advocacy. Using Tredinnick’s text as a reference, this paper will critically reconsider the question of affect in relation to the wider claims by ecocritics as to the ethical and political efficacy of the literary imagination. What kind or quality of emotional response does the ‘ecopoetic’ literary text elicit, and how does this correlate with or contradict the ethical and political agenda of such writing? Do the transformative ambitions of texts such as Tredinnick’s ‘landscape memoir’ (Tim Winton is credited with coining the term) constitute a phenomenological poetics by which affect is transfigured as political effect? By extension, the literary, cultural and philosophical implications of the “landscape memoir” will be considered, for the genre, if open to question, is a response to an imperative born of the contemporary ecological crisis. In providing a means of imaginatively re-­‐viewing of the relation of human beings to the land and earth – the land is poetically reconceived as interactive presence, not framed object – the ‘landscape memoir’ challenges the conventional assumptions concerning the human subject’s place in and experience of the non-­‐human world. Anna Helle (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) The Affective Performatives of Body and Sexuality in Tytti Heikkinen’s Taxidermied Animal’s Warmth Tytti Heikkinen (b. 1969) is a Finnish experimental female poet who uses found material from the internet as the raw material of her poems. She has published three collections of poetry in Finnish: Täytetyn eläimen lämpö (2008, “Taxidermied Animal’s Warmth”); Varjot astronauteista (2009, ”Shadows From Astronauts”); and Moulin Extra Beauté (2012). A selection of her poems has also been published as an English translation titled Taxidermied Animal’s Warmth (2013). Many of Heikkinen’s poems in Taxidermied Animal’s Warmth deal with corporeality and sexuality. This paper focuses on the so called “Miss FATTY-­‐XL” poems which in the Finnish original Varjot astronauteista form a separate section. The speaking I of these poems is a young girl who talks quite unrestrainedly and roughly about her body and sexuality, but about loneliness, shame, and fatness, too. The poems express and arouse different kinds of feelings such as anxiety, pity and amusement which make the reading experience quite confusing. The language and style of the poems is affective in many ways. The first one of the “Miss FATTY-­‐XL” poems begins with the following lines: “Fuck i’m a fatty when others are skinny. / Also Im short, am I a fatty or short? Wellyeah / I’m such a grosss fatty that it makes no sens…” From the very beginning it is clear that the vocabulary of the poems is rather vulgar and that the poems are replete with spelling mistakes that at times remind of the language of the internet chat forums. This presentation approaches Heikkinen’s poems as performatives of certain kind of girlhood in which the excessive bodily and sexual aspects are at the forefront. The paper seeks to analyze the poems from the viewpoint of the emotions or affects expressed by the speaking I but also from the angle of how the poems affect the reader. One of the key concepts here is excess: the speaking I sees herself as too fat, she is excessively sexual, she makes too many misspellings and she speaks too openly about her personal life and problems. The paper discusses both the form and the content of the poems form the angle of affectivity. The theoretical frame of the presentation consists of theories of affect (Ngai 2005, and others) but the feminist viewpoints will also be considered. Since the Miss FATTY-­‐XL poems are made of supposedly authentic found material from the internet chat forums the poems are immediately political on their nature which will also be taken into account. 36 Laura Henderson (University of Melbourne) The Film Moved Me: Emotional Contagion, Film and Affective Landscapes There is little doubt that certain landscapes hold an “affective atmosphere”: an aura of contagious emotion that touches every person who explores the space. One of the key aspects found in a review of the literature on psychogeography and emotional landscapes is the way that humans infuse the landscape with an emotional contagion. The underlying principle is that the subject, by walking the space, begins to take on and experience emotions previously implanted into the environment. However, although filmic landscapes often present the most affective geographies people make contact with, very little work has been done on how the cinematic spectator understands psychogeographies. This paper explores emotional contagion as a mechanism for affect transferring from space to subject, and from screen to spectator. It sets out an account of film as a spatialized, embodied narrative which moves the viewer (emotionally) by moving the camera. Compounding the gap in literature on filmic psychogeography is a dearth of interdisciplinary accounts of affect. Consequently, the paper approaches the topic of affective landscapes through a psychological and theoretical lens. The paper looks at some of the prescient research on empathy and mirror neurons in order to create a fully phenomenological framework for considering the spectator. It also examines Michael Wooldridge and Nicholas R. Jennings’ work on multi-­‐agent theories of emotional contagion, in order to better realise how the subject’s interaction with space is a destabilising force. Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere (2010) is used as an example of a filmic psychogeography. The characters in Somewhere travel in order to spark feelings and experiences. In so doing, they reveal many of the underlying instincts that lead humans to relate to, explore and be affected by landscapes. Consequently, the paper argues that cinema give us the opportunity to experience a space, to say “I am touching the walls” from within a filmic psychogeography. By manipulating and mirroring the cognitive functions behind consciousness, cinema is able to achieve this without fully revealing the virtuality of the experience. Subsequently, the emotions of a film’s landscape infect the viewer as they would in a material affective atmosphere. Though limited in scope, this research has potentially wider applications. By examining the idea of cognitive frameworks, it becomes clear that films inexorably change our perception of material landscapes. Furthermore, the experience of cinematic psychogeography may represent one of the larger and more fundamental pleasures of spectatorship, and therefore further illuminate why exactly human beings are so captivated by films and their settings. The question of why film moves us, it would seem, must first be answered by considering what landscapes the film camera is moving us through. Angela Hesson (University of Melbourne) Of Hedgerows and Holy Relics: Queering Nostalgia in the Novels of Ronald Firbank In a review of the most recent edition of Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth and Other Novels, Steven Moore advised readers, ‘Wear your best clothes when you read these, and have a magnum of champagne at hand.’ Here, Moore articulates the long-­‐standing association between Firbank’s writing and pleasure; the sense of luxury, of sensuality, of frivolity, which pervades his work, and also the personal, even intimate ways in which his texts have been received. W.H. Auden famously proclaimed Firbank’s novels ‘an absolute test. A person who dislikes them…may, for all I know, possess some admirable quality but I do not ever wish to see him again.’ Conversely, Evelyn Waugh, reacting to the perceived immaturity and vulgarity of Firbank’s narratives, remarked that ‘I think there would be something wrong with a middle-­‐aged man who could take pleasure in Firbank.’ That 37 Firbank should inspire such passionately polarized responses is unsurprising. As this paper will demonstrate, his novels fluidly interweave erotic, religious and decorative excess in a manner so self-­‐consciously scandalous that the reader must, almost by necessity, select a mode of outright absorption or outright exclusion. For Firbank, as for the Decadent writers of the 1890s upon whose work much of his own was modelled, the artistic surface was fetishised and narrative frequently subjugated to it; yet his novels are equally preoccupied with notions of feeling. When Firbank published Valmouth in 1919, England was in the grip of post-­‐war Protestant nationalism, the hearty moral earnestness of which lent his cast of lustful centenarians, ‘twinkling negresses,’ and debaucherous Roman clerics, as well as his heady exoticist interiors, an unmistakable air of dissidence. It becomes apparent, early in any chosen example of Firbank’s writing, that queerness is the rule rather than the exception. Religious feeling is allied invariably with an erotic impulse; saints and martyrs are evoked not as icons of purity, but as symbols of fleshly, sexually ambiguous desire. Perhaps most curious is the combination of Firbank’s eccentric, ritualised hedonism with his insistence upon the essential Englishness of his narrative, his determination to build his erotic, exotic fantasy upon the cornerstones of the country house novel. It is via the picturesque lanes of old England that we arrive at Valmouth, and it is in the great houses of the aristocracy that the interlacing narratives of fetishistic, homoerotic, and interracial desire are realised. His work is thus inflected with an unlikely and potent amalgam of subversion and nostalgia. Yet in spite of the elements of caricature and cliché integral to Firbank’s unique brand of camp, his novels are equally infused with a sincerity of affection that is directed both inward, toward their characters, and also outward, toward the knowing, sympathetic reader. Mining the farthest reaches of empire for inspiration, Firbank invented a fetishistic, homoerotic utopia, cosily enveloped in familiar countryside. This paper will argue that Firbank’s novels, replete with rituals, relics and stolen glimpses through hedges, serve not only to glorify a Decadent past, but also to aestheticise, historicise and sanctify a queer present. Helen Hickey (University of Melbourne) The Authority of Tears Lisa Zunshine praises the fruitful and fluid potential of the ‘fuzziness of boundaries’ and temporal instability that cognitive cultural approaches offer to literature. Using Zunshine’s suggested ‘bricoleur’ approach, this paper explores human tears in readers and authors of literature. Tears provide a perplexing challenge when thinking about embodiment and affect. Ephemeral and evaporative, their polymorphous and, at times, ambiguous meaning challenges our understandings about their cause and their work. Two strands of this visceral challenge apply: writing that induces tears in its readers and writing that induces or originates in the affect of tears in the author. Examples from two dissimilar genres (works of Charles Dickens and autographical medieval manuscripts) will highlight my case. 38 Penelope Hone (University of New South Wales) Physiological Acoustics and Literary Form: the Nineteenth-­‐Century “Affective Turn” According to Wimsatt and Beadsley’s “The Affective Fallacy”, the aesthetic value of a work of art has little to no correspondence with the mind’s experience and response to aesthetic form. Censuring critics who try to derive a “standard of criticism from the psychological effects” of a work of art, their 1949 polemic is particularly hostile towards physiological theories of aesthetic affect. Drawing on nineteenth-­‐century physiological novel theory, this paper contests Wimsatt and Beardsley’s a-­‐historicising supposition. It is in part owing to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s pointed censure of physiological considerations of how a text might be read that the constitutive relation between the formation of a modern literary aesthetics in the mid-­‐nineteenth century and emergent physiological theories of mind has, until recently, been forgotten–buried under an accumulated critical unconscious. However, as Nicholas Dames and Vanessa Ryan have shown, the relation between mid-­‐nineteenth-­‐century theories of literary form and psycho-­‐phsyiology produced a rich and contested cultural discourse. Expanding on their work, this paper considers the particular role acoustics played in conceiving of a literary aesthetics in this period. Contra Wimsatt and Beardsley’s suggestion that the work of art under consideration disappears under the subject-­‐oriented focus of physiologically driven criticism, the period’s sensitivity to the sonic imprint literary form made on the reader’s mind reveals a theory of literary form that is at once respectful of a work’s (universal) aesthetic value, and attentive to the constitutive role affect plays in its (aesthetic) mediation. This paper reads George Henry Lewes’s physiological account of literary form–
The Principles of Success in Literature–with a particular ear to its emphasis on the acoustic affect of the literary voice. Doing so, I underscore how this ‘affective turn’ in the 1860s brought critical attention to the ways in which a text conscripts (to borrow from Garrett Stewart) a particular response through the rhythmic cadences of prose. Noting the similarities between Lewes’s and Matthew Arnold’s contemporary cultural theory the paper then considers how this theory of literary form defers to an individual’s physiological response to literary form, as well as a Romantic notion of an inspired literary aesthetics. The paper therefore highlights the historical short-­‐sightedness of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s critique of physiological theories of literary affect. Sharing distinct similarities with more recent critical theories of literary aesthetics, such as Stewart’s Phonotext, the “affective turn” reverberating out of the nineteenth-­‐century illuminates a complex history of the relation between the reading mind and literary form. Daniel Hourigan (University of Southern Queensland) Coraline, Psychoanalysis, and the Other Mother Neil Gaiman’s imagining of the terrain of girlhood in works such as Coraline may be seen to popularise a post-­‐feminist view of femininity. Although many of Gaiman’s texts and their adaptations into other media such as cinema deal with issues of daughterhood, motherhood, fatherhood, class, power, gender and ethnicity, the overwhelming recognition of Gaiman’s work focuses on his innovative story-­‐telling techniques that fuse the art of contemporary fairytales with the traumatic dark encounters of H.P. Lovecraft. The point of focus for this paper is the narrative of Coraline. Both the novella and the film tell the story of a young girl, Coraline Jones, and her encounter with a mysterious other world accessible through a small door in her family’s new home. The narrative sets its namesake protagonist on a difficult path to unraveling the enigma of the familial bond and her place within such a bond. More specifically, the question that Gaiman raises in the context of Coraline is the question of maternal desire: what does 39 the mother want? Without reducing Coraline to an echo of the late Freud’s question ‘what does woman want?’ Gaiman takes his audience through several key thematics of feminist psychoanalysis and post-­‐feminist critique: the formation of gender and identity in the phallocentric economy of paternal authority, the enigma of the Other’s desire and the distortion and anamorphosis of the all too human. These themes are important not only to Gaiman’s text, but also to broader questions of femininity, sexualities and the faculty of desire itself for they query the basis of understanding our own embodiment and the possibility for transgression. While subjective enjoyment is an important device in the story of Coraline, it is more difficult to discern the contours of how Gaiman is approaching the mother-­‐
daughter relationship. At a glance, Coraline is an oblique examination of the figure of the mother from a daughter’s point of view. It is the namesake daughter of Coraline, Coraline Jones, who encounters this motherhood in its enigmatic otherness. Therefore the focus of this discussion is how Coraline tarries with the enigma of maternal desire and re-­‐establishes her symbolic position with her family in the wake of a traumatic encounter with an archaic ‘other mother’. Joe Hughes (University of Melbourne) Time, Form and Desire: The Representation of Action in Fanny Hill In 1804 Anna Latetia Barbauld remarked with some surprise that the early novel was not actually scenic. The conception of the novel as a series of linked scenes was not at all a given of novel form—and this despite the number of novelists with ties to the theatre. It is only with Burney, she proposes, that the novel becomes properly scenic because it is only with Burney that the novel begins to form itself around the extended representation of dialogue. Dialogue, as has often been noted, allows narration to approach mimesis. It gives the act represented the form and time of the act itself. It creates the illusion of scene. Amongst the many questions Barbauld’s observation raises is a question which is the inverse of the one she posed: not why does dialogue allow scene to emerge, but why does the novel consistently fail to represent action scenically? In fact, the action scene—extended passages narrated in the scenic mode which relate a sequence of actions—is exceptionally rare both before and after Burney. While dialogue scenes abound after Evelina, the representation of action, when it appears, inevitably tends toward summary rather than scene. In this paper I want to explore an early exception to this failure of representation: the proto-­‐pornograpic novel. The demands of the genre require that the narrative slow down and pause on each action and reaction, making the sequence available to the reader’s gaze. Cleland’s keyhole scenes are exemplary in this regard: alongside Fanny Hill we peep into the room and allow our gaze to stop on each gradual revelation of a bosom, each manly thrust of the machine, each contortion of pleasure. The proliferation of metaphors for various organs, the rapid oscillation between description and reflection, Cleland’s extreme detail, the careful sequencing of action, all create surfaces with a certain coefficiant of friction which slows the narration down, allowing it to approach the time of action and reaction and thus become properly scenic. These narrative techniques can be read precisely as attempts to slow down narrative time and allow the reader’s gaze to be absorbed in the scene. My argument is not that Barbauld has missed an early precursor to the scenic novel. On the contrary, her argument, as far as literary history goes, is more or less accurate. My claim rather is that this early anomaly reveals an essential feature of the scenic form, namely the convertibility it establishes between form and desire. 40 Aleksondra Hultqvist (Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne) Eliza Haywood's Laboratory of Feeling The early novel, because of its ability to acutely describe both inner-­‐sensation and outer demonstration of feeling, because of its ability to examine both the inner workings of a fictional mind and the outer commentary of the narrator, is the perfect site for explorations in the significance of emotion in the eighteenth century. Several critics have recently examined eighteenth-­‐century literature and the way it explores emotion and explains significant historical and political change. Jon Elster has argued, “we can read plays and novels as the closest thing to a controlled experiment involving high-­‐
stakes human emotions.” (Elster, Alchemies of the Mind 108). And scholars such as Alan T. McKenzie, Nicole Eustace, Rebecca Tierny-­‐Hinez, and Kathleen Lubey explore the way in which the depictions of emotion in the literature of the eighteenth century provided not only a laboratory of feeling, but also a platform for individual understanding and social change. The work of Eliza Haywood is a particularly fertile place to examine feeling, or “the Passions,” in social structures. Much of her early fiction takes emotion as its starting point, such as her first successful novel, Love in Excess (1719). In her fiction, she defines the major and minor meanings of passion, creates characters dominated by their emotional life and then places them in dynamic plots, as if to see how their passions will determine their character and life outcomes through navigating such situations. Through these explorations, Haywood writes an authentic philosophy of the passions years before the more formal, later eighteenth-­‐century works on the theories of sentiment were published. This is not to say that Haywood’s explorations of the passions and the moral philosophy of the later eighteenth century are the same, but rather that they are of a kind. Haywood’s work developed an ethics of passionate experience: her prose effectively forms a vocabulary for the passions, demonstrates their significance in the experience of the fictional characters, and uses authorial commentary to create an ethics of emotion. This paper argues that Eliza Haywood’s sustained and specific discussion of emotion in her fiction theorizes philosophical modes of emotional discourse in narrative form. By examining the laboratory of feeling that she creates in Love in Excess, I define her ethics of emotion which both builds upon pre-­‐ and early modern theories of the passion, and anticipates later eighteenth-­‐century philosophies of emotion. Aaron Humphrey (University of Adelaide) Emotion, Anonymity and Affect in Asylum Seeker Comics Two comics about Australia’s asylum-­‐seeker policies gained considerable online attention, almost simultaneously in February, 2014. The first was an 18-­‐page “graphic novel” published by the Australian government’s Customs and Border Protection Service (CBPS) intended to deter members of the persecuted Hazara minority in Afghanistan from seeking asylum in Australia. Although the comic was published on the CBPS website in November, it was brought to public attention in February by an article in The Guardian which attracted more than 700 reader comments, and was quickly republished across the web by sites like BuzzFeed and News.com.au. The second comic, ‘A Guard’s Story,’ was a webcomic centred around an anonymous interview with a former immigration detention centre worker. One of the last pieces to be published on the non-­‐profit journalism site The Global Mail before the site stopped updating in February, the comic, which is highly critical of the Australian government’s policies, spread quickly on social media, and has been shared more 60,000 times on Facebook. Although the two comics were intended for different audiences and are diametrically opposed politically, both use graphic literature to depict Australia’s 41 refugee detention centres as emotionally distressing place to be. Both are examples of the way the unique grammar of comics (including Scott McCloud’s concepts of ‘closure’ and ‘masking,’ and Thierry Groensteen’s concept of ‘braiding’) can be used to encourage readers to invest their imaginations and emotions in these graphic narratives, potentially increasing their potential to be spread virally over social networks. Furthermore, while the visual nature of these comics is part of their emotional and psychological appeal, it also has the effect of distancing the reader from their sources. In this paper, I will demonstrate how the CBPS comic describes Australia’s detention centres as an inhumane deterrent in a way that cannot be easily quoted as government policy, while employing an inscrutable visual style that recalls the anonymity of clipart. Conversely, ‘A Guard’s Story’ uses an idiosyncratic style of drawing as a way of affecting a personal psychological depth while politically shielding its anonymous narrator. By focusing on these discourses of emotion and anonymity, this presentation will examine how each of these comics fits into the wider national dialogue about asylum seekers, exploring how each comic attempts show the un-­‐sayable, both psychologically and politically. Francesca Kavanagh (University of Melbourne) Fast Cars and Classic Literature: Innocent and Guilty Pleasures in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga In her series the Twilight Saga, Stephenie Meyer uses her heroine Bella to navigate competing and morally hazardous pleasures. While Bella is faced with numerous chances to enjoy the wealth and privileges of her vampire boyfriend she repeatedly rejects them, preferring to indulge the seemingly more innocent pleasure of reading. The delicate balance maintained between these two realms of pleasure is made more uncertain by the construction of Bella’s character as both unfeminine and yet inexplicably alluring, as well as the audience’s desires to vicariously enjoy these guilty pleasures through her. In this paper, I seek to demonstrate that the act of reading for both Bella and the reader of Twilight, blurs the boundaries of innocent and guilty pleasures constructed by Meyer. The longest instance of direct literary engagement in the first novel can be seen as the tipping point in the conflation of guilty and innocent pleasures. Once she has admitted to herself that she loves Edward, Bella draws on a much used “compilation of the works of Jane Austen” (Meyer, 147) to distract her from the anxiety, and increasing frustration of his absence. However, she soon finds, as the thousands of Twilight fans already know, that literature is tied to pleasure in a much more ambivalent relationship than simple escapism. Austen, rather than serving as a distraction, returns Bella again and again to both Edward’s name and his character, drawn from the rakish Byronic heroes of Austen’s fiction. Bella’s frustration becomes progressively sexual as she strives to find distraction. She eventually settles for “think[ing] of nothing but the warmth on [her] skin” (Meyer, 148). Lying outside in the sun, she traces the sun’s progress down her body “my eyelids, my cheekbones, my nose, my lips, my forearms, my neck, soak[ing] through my light shirt…” (Meyer, 148). Meyer stops just short of including Bella’s breasts in the list of places associated with desire and pleasure. She fades out with an ellipsis and then jump-­‐cuts to a few hours later, as Bella is woken by her father returning home. The dreams and the implications of such an erotically charged moment are left hanging. Unlike many of Bella’s periods of unconsciousness, this one is given no overt significance by the narrative except the uncanny mood at the scene of waking where Bella tantalisingly adds that she feels “that I wasn’t alone” (Meyer, 148) before throwing herself into cooking and cleaning duties for her apparently inept father. This is the last literary reference in the first novel and despite the lack of commentary, it is clear that reading is deeply associated with the now blurred 42 boundaries between innocent and guilty pleasures, allowing Bella to experience desire, and work through her frustration with the help of Austen’s Edwards. Literature has enabled the guilty pleasure of sex to be made consistent with Bella’s ‘innocent’ character. This is crucial in the maintenance of the text’s own set of literary pleasures which range from ‘guilty’ indulgence in feminine, young adult fiction, to ‘innocent’ joy in the reading process and criticism. Jasmin Kelaita (University of New South Wales) Awkward Characters/Anxious Subjects: The Affect of Awkwardness in the Modernist Fiction of Jean Rhys The recourse to gracious and polite social interaction forms an undisclosed contract in fiction. This paper examines the implications of this civility and questions how the practice of social graciousness and well-­‐conditioned manners supports the belief that to be “proper” is to be a unified, consolidated and unaffected self. The inter-­‐war fiction of Jean Rhys presents female protagonists that are not gracious and rarely polite; they lack decorum and social perception, as well as being considerably misaligned with structures of appropriate femininity. Rhys’s women exist on the borders which define proper selfhood, and in so doing, expose the seams of the subject in modernity. I argue that the affect produced by the inherent social awkwardness of Rhys’ female characters is critical to understanding the subversive potential they offer. I examine this subversive potential by way of illustrating how these characters challenge and reshape available subject positions through their mincingly loud, and corporeally excessive, rejection of social structures of propriety. The social unease generated by this incongruence sparks an awkward, and often visceral and materially felt, reaction from other characters in her work; namely, the gentlemen who proliferate her texts and are aligned with standard discourses of social propriety and, as such, cannot stand “women making scenes of themselves.” These “scenes” are also keenly felt by the reader who cannot help but cringe at the constant faux pas performed by Rhys’s leads. The conceptual engagement with awkwardness as a function of subject production, maintenance and acceptance draws on scholarly examinations of civility and social propriety in Victorian fiction. Re-­‐placing this frame on Modernist fiction exposes the intrinsic class and gender distinctions presupposed by this field of inquiry which, in turn, reveals the violence civility enacts on the body. Exploring this violence in the context of Rhys’s work highlights the tensions inherent to standard accounts of her as a Modernist, a woman writer and a Caribbean expatriate. By way of highlighting how affect generates sites of resistance to normative subject positions through embodied rejections of decorum and propriety, this paper reclaims Rhys’s work from the commonly held assumption that her female characters exist simply as victims, or social outcasts starved of agency. Jenny Kohn (University of Michigan) Feelings, Identification, and Difference: the Politics of Victorian Novel Form As Adam Phillips wrote, “That people are not identical, but that it is possible to be equal in certain ways, is one of our modern political hopes." This was also the optimistic premise of nineteenth-­‐century liberalism, which confronted the challenges of imagining a collectivity composed of vastly different people in an era of colonization, globalization, and unprecedented industrialization. This paper explores the problem of difference in nineteenth-­‐century culture as the task of embracing the possibility of people's difference while also mitigating the political effects thereof. What was a foundational problem for nineteenth-­‐century liberal theory was also, this paper argues, a constitutive problem to 43 which the form of the Victorian novel responded. I argue that, in modeling an affective structure based on general rather than individual feelings, the Victorian novel taught its readers to live with difference by learning to feel with characters, even or especially when they could not identify with them. Political shifts in and involving Britain, such as the Reform Acts and Married Women’s Property Acts and uprisings in the colonies, brought the fact of difference into close proximity in the Victorian period, as the body politic had to contend with reimagining citizenship on a broader scale. Liberal ideals of equality and freedom were premised on a notion of progress, and a basic belief in a universal human good to which all people, regardless of their differences, could at least in principle aspire. Moreover, difference posed a particular problem for the literary marketplace, as the novel had to become relevant to what was taking shape as a mass readership on an unprecedented scale – what novelist Wilkie Collins called “The Unknown Public.” Focusing on popular novels of the nineteenth century, which dealt quite explicitly with the problem of living with difference in an expanding world, this paper argues that novels solved the question of how to live with difference in a way that political theories of equality could not access. These novels cultivated a large, varied, and crucially unknown readership, rather than a selective one, and in so doing hailed their readers as a mass public. As such, readers were interpellated as the direct addressees of a text, while simultaneously understanding that summoning their readers as the addressees of the text, while always framing that the text, as a mass product, could not address any one particular reader, but must address all its readers in all their differences. My paper thus sheds light on our understanding of the politics of novel form, and the way in which it operates through what Raymond Williams has described as practical consciousness, and what David Halperin has more recently described as practices of being: a way of feeling that is collective, premised on a shared and general affective form, rather than specific affective content. Gabrielle Kristjanson (University of Melbourne) Cruel Desire: Narcissism and the Female Predator In Femininity and Dominance (1990), Sandra Lee Bartky writes, “narcissism is at once a source of profound satisfaction and a temptation to be resisted” (39). Filled with desire and trepidation, feminine narcissism urges its subject forward as it holds her back—
problematically promising a satisfaction that it also warns against. This tension is compounded when the narcissistic female character is portrayed as a child predator. Yet, what at first seems a troubling pairing of the narcissist and the child predator can instead be interpreted as an inevitable and mutual eventuality. Indeed, Bartky claims that “[w]e can now grasp the nature of feminine narcissism with more precision: It is infatuation with an inferiorized body” (40; emphasis in original). For Bartky, this obsession is experienced as a self-­‐infatuation characterized by excessive efforts to maintain a youthful and beautiful body, but when self-­‐centered desire is extended outward, the “feminine ideal of stasis” can only be situated alternatively in the body of the child (40). My paper will interrogate this exteriorization of feminine narcissism through an analysis of Alissa Nutting’s 2013 novel, Tampa. In this controversial depiction, Nutting provides an especially cruel version of feminine desire in her protagonist Celeste Price, a young and beautiful year eight English teacher who engages in illicit sexual relations with two of her male students. The primary relationship is with Jack, a quiet boy on the cusp of puberty who believes that he is Celeste’s lover. Yet, the book makes clear to the reader that their relation is not one of mutual exchange, but rather Jack is used by Celeste as an object upon which she can project and act out her own masturbatory fantasies. Jack serves as a place-­‐holder for Celeste’s narcissistic desire for herself; as 44 Bartky describes, the narcissistic female’s obsession is with “her own finished and perfect thinghood,” here played out not through the mirror but through the inferiorized body of an adolescent boy (38). The cruelty of this self-­‐satisfying practice is palpable, making the experience of reading Tampa distasteful and, arguably, traumatic. The reader is acutely aware of Jack’s emotional trauma, a latent trauma only realized after his encounter with the predator, which invites a reading of Jack as a victim. Significantly, however, this interpretation is not merely because of his youthful vulnerability but because Jack represents a particular type of masculinity that is victimizable by female desire. Jack is contrasted by the character of Boyd, the other male student that Celeste targets, who relishes in their illicit affair. Boyd’s presence neutralizes the cruelty and power of the female narcissist and allows for her sexual excess to be contained by the text. Importantly, it is the collision between these two types of masculinities—Jack’s and Boyd’s—that results in the end of both affairs and brings Celeste to criminal trial. Rowena Lennox (University of Technology Sydney) Head of a Dog How do literature and other writing affect what we feel and know about dogs and dingoes? Can a human get inside a dog’s head? I begin this paper by following my dog and observing how she perceives the world before thinking about how various dogs in fiction and non-­‐fiction are represented. The stories people tell about dogs and dingoes affect more than just how we respond to them and how we treat them. Humans’ stories and language construct them. In a passage in Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy effectively gets inside the head of Levin’s dog Laska when they are out hunting, portraying her sense of smell as her way of understanding the world, and also her obedience to Levin even when she knows better. The dog heroes, Buck and Dusty, in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and Frank Dalby Davison’s Dusty are also extremely loyal one-­‐man dogs. Buck and Dusty both straddle the divide between tame and wild but the narrative shape of each book differs. The Call of the Wild builds to an emotional crescendo and ends with Buck roaming free with the timberwolves in the Yukon. Dusty cannot roam like Buck because much of his environment has been cleared and fenced. The dingo of Captain’s Flat, described in a 1942 Canberra Times article, is a product of such an agricultural environment. This dingo had allegedly killed 1,000 sheep before it escaped from a trap by chewing off its front leg and held a pack of domestic dogs at bay before a man killed it with a stick. Similarly Inky, a young Fraser Island dingo, was also killed for not knowing his place in relation to human beings. He displayed behaviour that showed he had become habituated to humans so Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service rangers, in accordance with the management strategy that prohibits interaction between humans and dingoes, killed him. Deborah Bird Rose describes different relationships between humans and dingoes when she draws upon her knowledge of Aboriginal Beginning Law. Judith Wright, in her elegy for a trapped dingo, places the dingo in the framework of Greek mythology. In ‘Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’ twentieth-­‐century philosopher of ethics Emmanuel Levinas evokes a stray dog who recognised Levinas and his fellow prisoners in a Nazi labour camp as men when their gaolers and other humans treated the prisoners as subhuman. Each of the dogs discussed in this paper cannot simply be positioned on a continuum between tame or wild, or aggressive or docile. Each of these canine characters displays constellations of behaviour: curious and threatening, or independent and friendly, or irrational and rational. Whether we can incorporate them 45 into a humane system of ethics yet or not, dogs have lived with humans for longer than any other animal. They are part of our story and many of them show an emotional understanding of humans that humans are still learning to reciprocate. Nick Lord (University of Queensland) Design and Affect: Feeling Our Way through Danielewski's Labyrinths In this paper, I will examine the role of affect in the process of interpreting ostentatiously designed metafictional texts. In her introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Patricia Clough notes that we have witnessed “a recent turn in critical theory to affect, especially the conceptualization of affect that draws on the line of thought from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari back through Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson” (1). Such a line of critical inquiry has, in certain manifestations, sought to redefine or clarify the relationship between the conscious and pre-­‐conscious, an endeavour exemplified by Brian Massumi’s realignment of cultural theory’s emphasis from language to the body—from speech to feeling— and Catherine Malabou’s and William Connolly’s theoretical considerations of the materiality of the brain. Cultural products, too, have been examined as ways of uncovering the connections between affect and aesthetics. My paper, informed by this tradition of critical thought, will investigate Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, House of Leaves. Danielewski’s book is polyvocalic and diegetically complex, consisting of a number of paratexts that have been constructed around an apocryphal film by the award-­‐winning photographer, Will Navidson, which, it seems, documents his family’s reaction to and exploration of a vast and shifting labyrinth that opens up inside their home. Navidson’s exploration of this space is emulated at each narrative level in a variety of ways: the bulk of the novel consists of a pseudo-­‐academic study of the film by a blind “graphomaniac” named Zampanó, which, in turn, has been compiled and edited by a tattooist named Johnny Truant, whose footnotes document his own reflections on the manuscript. At the outermost level are the Editors, who have, ostensibly, published the edited manuscript as House of Leaves, complete with their own clarifying footnotes, appendices, and index. The reader is thus encouraged to navigate between these levels, making decisions as to which narrative path to follow and for how long. The reading experience is further complicated by the novel’s gradual dissolution into textual chaos, marked by the presence of, among other obstacles, blank pages, upside-­‐down and sideways print, musical notation, Braille, and Morse code. We can, therefore, think of House of Leaves as engaging with design, whether it be the architecture of the Navidson’s home or the meticulous planning of the book itself. Because of this, my paper will heed Bruno Latour’s observation that designed artefacts lend themselves to interpretation, and will extend a theory of design that is based on James Gibson’s concept of affordances—that is, it considers what the design of the object offers or provides—by incorporating the phenomenological work of both Wolfgang Iser and Martin Heidegger. This will allow me to explore how the book’s construction of labyrinthine textual and narrative spaces is able to invoke and manipulate an affect similar in structure to Freud’s unheimlich and Heidegger’s angst that, I argue, is crucial to an interpretative engagement with the novel’s plot. 46 Mary Luckhurst (University of York) Acting and Reanimating the Dead Since the eighteenth century Western constructs of actor training have been allied with scientific discourses but the description of performance by actors themselves has often been shot through with allusions to the uncanny and the spectral. Many performers describe acting in terms of making connections with an otherworldly realm, raising spirits, channelling energy forces and resurrecting the dead. For Simon Callow performing is ‘kind of voodoo’ and for Declan Donnellan it is the release of an internal ghost, a hidden persona in the actor. Theorists have been impatient with what they see as mystification but the fact that actors often articulate what they do in spectral terms is connected with the origins of modern actor training and is an attempt to reach for metaphors which bridge orthodox science and the occult in order to find a language that can address states of self-­‐alienation, feelings of bodily transcendence, and experiences of otherness. This paper considers examples of actors attempting to describe a craft that Phillip Seymour Hoffmann once said that ‘normal people run screaming from’ and seeks to account for the professional actor’s preference for metaphors of the uncanny. Scarlet Luk (Yale University) Middlemarch's Narrator and the Ladies As popular belief goes, the narrator of Middlemarch is obviously a man, or at least one has a “strong sense” that they are, thereby continuing to sponsor an unusually strong boundary between author and narrator. In one version of this reading, Cathy Maxwell has said “[Dorothea Brooke’s] very ignorance seems to make her more attractive to the narrator: it gives her the sexual piquancy of the innocent and it makes him powerful in his superior knowledge as a voyeur”. And yet, what if this superior voyeurism was not the bearer of a “him”, but a ‘her’? As Henry James attests, what distinguished Eliot from male writers like Fielding and Thackeray in her depiction of women is the lack of “a sort of titillation of the masculine sense of difference”. Assuming that James’s own ‘strong sense’ holds out against others to the contrary, this identification is a tantalising one. My paper engages with the erotic readerly possibilities of this, taking the cue from David Kurnick’s spin on Kenny Marotta, who casts the “conqueror” Eliot as the “butch hero to Dorothea’s damsel-­‐in-­‐distress”. This crosshatches in a provocative way with a well-­‐rehearsed critical engagement in Eliot’s gender politics, especially in the narratorial engagement with characters such as Dorothea. For example, despite the acerbity with which George Eliot parodied the titular fiction in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, there lingers a certain perverse fondness for them (and most certainly in the recapitulation of their novelistic traits), much like an overseer would have to a group of hopeless initiates into her own perfected art. More startlingly, much of what Eliot excoriates appears in her own fiction, rearranged into less hysterical variations: “she [a generic ‘she’] as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right moment”. No vicious baronets exist in Middlemarch, but many of the foibles of the lady novel do – the “frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic” live on in various guises. I propose that Eliot recuperates certain formal and affective aspects of the lady novel by the narrator’s reading of them in a kind of conceptual quotation, with Dorothea as the subject not only as a muted kind of parody, but (as suggested above) of desire. The fascination for the somewhat awkward Dorothea is also an implicit fascination with the lady novel. The result of such rearrangement and narrative focalisation is a problematic one, however, especially taking the narrator’s possible gender into account: 47 Dorothea is ‘kept’ for the narrator, and the reader too experiences the complicity with which we may be denied vision, closure or the dignity of self-­‐realisation. Peta Mayer (University of Melbourne) Recovering Affect, Sensuality and the Backwards Turn by Staging the Performance of the Aesthete in Anita Brookner’s A Misalliance (1986) In A Misalliance (1986), Anita Brookner’s sixth novel (of 25), the main protagonist, Blanche Vernon, habitually visits the Italian Rooms of London’s National Gallery seeking knowledge of ‘the world of love and pleasure’ depicted in Renaissance paintings of nymphs. When Blanche meets the ‘spectacular, vivid, obtrusive’ Sally Beamish, and decides she ‘was in fact a sort of a nymph’, Blanche’s visits to the gallery are suspended and her obsession is transferred to the striking younger woman (M, 29). In Frank Kermode’s review of A Misalliance, the master critic claims the novel ‘is about a woman abandoned by her husband of 20 years.’ He adds: ‘perhaps some of the motifs and symbols are a bit too heavily marked’. John Bayley joins the censorious chorus to contend that Brookner’s unnecessary emphasis on symbolism, ‘reveals a touching lack of self-­‐confidence.’ In this paper I suggest the canonical figures of Bayley and Kermode epitomise the dominant response to Brookner’s fiction by recuperating negative affects of loss and longing through what I term the ‘hetero-­‐chronic symbolic’. In addition, these critics demonstrate a resistance to contextualising positive affects of homoerotic love and pleasure in Brookner’s oeuvre. I present a queer reading of A Misalliance by producing the narrative personae of the aesthete as the hermeneutic figure able to access and interpret an array of affective, sensual, aesthetic, temporal and erotic behaviours in the text. I connect a field of floral, fruity, botanical and climatic motifs in Brookner’s novel to the intertextual matrix surrounding the Greek poet Sappho. Through my readings of Sappho, Plato, Madame de Staël, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Pater, I index the Brookner’s Sapphic intertextuality more specifically as form of nineteenth-­‐century sapphism – and related to a mode of Romantic Hellenism – both of which form part of the signifying matrix of the figure of the aesthete. I combine the text’s homoerotic motifs, the configuration of a ‘backwards turn’ and the idolatry of the senses to produce the figure of the aesthete. I draw on Walter Benjamin’s figure of history as an image, and Thomas Bahti’s reading of Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, to nominate the rhetorical figure of metaleptic prolepsis and the narrative of metamorphosis as the organising narrative and rhetorical forms across which to stage the performance of aesthete in A Misalliance. I propel the performance of the aesthete in A Misalliance across the narrative contours of guilt, punishment, redemption, purification and blessedness that Mikhail Bakhtin supplies as the problematic knots of the metamorphosis narrative. Based on my readings of Jacques Lacan, Bourdieu, Benjamin and Plato, I stage the self-­‐begetting performance of the aesthete in A Misalliance across the preconditions for a metaleptic turn in the contours of Blanche’s guilt and punishment in a hetero-­‐chronic present, the redemptive flashback as Blanche’s encounter with the nymphs and the forward prolepsis in the contours of purification and blessedness which chart Blanche’s relationship with Sally and her final journey to the sun. 48 Beornn McCarthy (University of Melbourne) Affective Labour and Field Stone Covenants: Romantic Repetitions of Job from Robert Lowth to Autonomists ‘Have you read Job?’, asks the Young Man in SØren Kierkegaard’s philosophical novella, Repetition (1843). ‘Read it. Read it again and again.’ This curious display of an impassioned, poetic taste for The Book of Job is a telling repetition in Kierkegaard, who portrays the Young Man as an heir of a familiar Romantic trajectory. The Young Man is, of course, diagnosed by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym psychologist Constantin Constanius as a poet who has failed at religion and is therefore condemned to a pathetic sway of affections from tragedy to comedy. Kierkegaard’s ability to plumb the depths of a repetition of Job is ‘in covenant with the stones of the field’ (Job 5.23), and the formulations in Repetition are best understood in relation to the interpretation of religion that emerged in Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Spinoza and Bayle, whose philosophies of affections had a sympathetic absorption in the belles lettres and poetic critics of the eighteenth century. One of these eighteenth-­‐century critics of poetry, Bishop Robert Lowth, gave a series of lectures at Oxford beginning in the 1740s. Published in the Latin work, Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753), Lowth’s lectures analysed the sublime rhetoric of Job and his friends. The work would be translated by George Gregory in the year Lowth died, in 1787. The publisher of this volume Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews was Joseph Johnson, whose publishing house sheltered a generation of radical English authors. With such a readership, Lowth’s work was, as Robert Southey put in his 1807 Specimens of the Later English Poets, ‘fresh in the mind of every scholar’. Kierkegaard’s arrangement of poetry and prophecy, poet and prophet, is consistent with Lowth approach to sacred poetry: the Young Man in Repetition is consumed with affections ‘on the border of poetry’, seeking refuge in his ‘silent confident’, Job. Repetition’s modern poet-­‐Job is clearly a late-­‐comer to German Miltonism and its reception of Lowth. ‘The concept of the modern poet-­‐prophet’, argues Robert D. Richardson in his biography of Emerson, ‘runs from Lowth to Blake, to Herder, and to Whitman.’ Such a list of secret sharers in a peculiarly modern vocational assemblage does not, however, seem satisfactory. This paper will propose a different way of considering the enduring influence of Lowth’s sacred poetry. It will trace the ‘runs’ of one prophetic book – Job – as it emerges in the writings of Lowth, passes through William Blake and Kierkegaard, parabolises affective labour in the works of Antonio Negri, and possibly encounters OOO. It will be argued that Romantic repetitions of Job locate transcendence ‘on the border of poetry’, in a zone of indistinction between prophecy and poetry, where we find relations of labour and affect that act as tottering foundations for both literature and modernity. Homo faber, and homo sacer or, rather, the sacer faber, have become the source of a modernity’s covenant, which marks out the space of life and action that Marx’s working class was intended to fill. Inevitably, this prophecy has provoked Greek and Latinist revivals of acedia against Romanticism’s Jobs. Leigh McLennon (University of Melbourne) Burial, Language and Postcolonial Trauma: Reading Gothic Melancholia in Last of the Mohicans A pattern of hiding, conflict, capture and eventual escape repeats throughout James Fenimore Cooper’s the Last of the Mohicans (1826). As part of this pattern, the narrative repeats the Gothic motifs of gory violence, entombment and burial. This paper argues that Cooper evokes these Gothic motifs in Last of the Mohicans in order to aestheticise 49 colonialism as an unspeakable national and racial trauma. By aestheticising the violence of America’s colonial and colonising past – and the way this past is often buried and silenced – Cooper constructs a Gothic melancholia in his text. The Last of the Mohicans participates in a trope that represents the vanishing of the Indian as inevitable. However, the novel also suggests that the violence of this vanishing, a colonial violence that has been buried by national history, will inevitably return to haunt us. Framed by the psychoanalytic criticism of Freud, Abraham and Torok, and Eve Kofosky Sedgwick, my paper analyses how Mohicans attempts to represent the melancholic loss of America’s native people in three ways: through Gothic representations of burial following death, of live burial and of the burial of language. As Sedgwick argues, Gothic narratives are concerned with how language buries meaning: they bury narratives through framing stories and stories retold; through the circuitous repetition of narrative events; and they generally are concerned with the unspeakable and the unrepresentable. This paper thus analyses how Gothic burial and language work together in Last of the Mohicans to encrypt its Indian characters melancholically. In doing so, the paper next engages with Dana Luciano’s analysis of grief and mourning in Mohicans. Luciano contrasts emotive Indian “voice” with white language, constructing a binary account in which Indian voice is the true expression of affect and, oppositionally, white language is merely a means of representation. If Luciano’s text reads the affective and sacred purity of Indian voice in Last of the Mohicans, this paper responds by reading the Gothicized unspeakableness of the Indian language in this text. Through this reading, the paper further suggests that there is a need to analyse how Mohicans (and frontier novels more broadly) occlude or minimise racial encounters through what they do not narrate. The paper concludes by noting three key difficulties in performing an analysis of colonial melancholia. First, it notes the inherent difficulty of attempting to speak of the unspeakable when analysing trauma. Second, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and trauma, it notes that contemporary, critical diagnoses of postcolonial melancholia problematically assume that such criticism comes from a position removed from the aftermath of the trauma that is buried. Third and finally, the paper suggests recent analyses of postcolonial melancholia fail to recognise that the language of the psychoanalytic framework is itself Gothic. Consequently, there has been a significant failure to recognise how analysis of melancholia further Gothically aestheticises the very burials that it attempts to excavate. James Meffan (Victoria University Wellington) J.M. Coetzee Is Bad at Sex What to make of the persistent strain of unflattering sexual disclosure that runs through JM Coetzee’s “autobiographical” works? Not only does this seem a topic that lacks the gravity expected from the memoir of a great writer, at times (in Summertime in particular) it threatens to displace all mention of identifiably “writerly” concerns entirely. In this paper I will explore the function of sexual disclosure in Coetzee’s writing, paying particular attention to the way it represents an evidently unsatisfactory physical intimacy as in some way correlated to the intimacy of the relationship between reader and writer. 50 Kate Montague (University of New South Wales) Tragic Affect and the Postwar American Novel In Poetics Aristotle writes that the proper aim of tragedy is the imitation of an action in order to arouse “pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” In other words, the experience of dramatic tragedy should evacuate the body of these feelings, via the transformation of emotions into unnameable intensities. Framing the relationship between art and the emotions in similar terms, Fredric Jameson has very recently written that affect “somehow eludes language and its naming of things (and feelings), whereas emotion is pre-­‐eminently a phenomena sorted out into an array of names.” If for Aristotle, catharsis is directed at the bodily purgation of emotions via the mediation of art; and if for Jameson affect is the excess of un-­‐codified bodily sensation in literature; then we can say that affect is the energetic sine qua non of the tragic genre. This paper proposes to investigate the manifestation of tragic catharsis conceived of as affective intensity across several celebrated postwar American novels—William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy.” In all of these late twentieth and early twenty-­‐first century novels, dramatic forms of the tragic genre assert themselves anachronistically. By tracing the resurgence of premodern forms of tragedy from within these postmodern novels, this paper will address two questions: what are the aesthetic implications of this return to a tragic formalism for what is now called the “affective turn” in contemporary literature? And, why does the history and geography of postwar America give rise to a specifically tragic affect. Grace Moore (Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne) ‘So Wild and Beautiful a World Around Him’: Anthony Trollope and Antipodean Ecology Trollope visited the Antipodes twice. Once, for about eighteen months, between 1871 and 1872, and then again in 1875, when he mostly remained in New South Wales. His early colonial writings were marked by a proprietorial approach, through which he frequently depicted landscapes as feminized, while asserting a sense of mastery over all he surveyed. By the time he travelled to Australia, however, Trollope’s attitude to the colonial environment had become much more nuanced, and his attitude to Antipodean ecology was often remarkably perceptive and engaged. Examining a combination of Trollope’s fiction and travel writing, this paper will map his engagement with settler culture’s impact on the Australian terrain. I will explore Trollope’s representations of mining, ring-­‐barking and fire, positioning the author in relation to the advice meted out in guidebooks and emigrants’ manuals, while analyzing his engagement with ideas of the pastoral. I will consider some of the challenges that the Australian wilderness posed to Trollope’s sense of the aesthetic, and I will seek to situate his writing in relation to developing notions of an Australian gothic. Furthermore, I shall examine Trollope’s representations of Australian fauna, contextualizing his famous remark that ‘Australia is altogether deficient in sensational wild beasts’ (A&NZ, 208) and interrogating his representations of both endangerment and adaptation. This paper will end with an analysis of dingo-­‐hunting, using the work of Deborah Bird Rose and Freya Mathews to examine how the persecution of wild dogs provided an outlet for other forms of settler panic, while reading the dingo as a counter-­‐pastoralist. 51 Simone Murray (Monash University) Everyone’s a Critic: Mass Amateur Book Reviewing in the Digital Literary Sphere The rise of mass amateur book reviewing on the internet has fundamentally changed the nature of modern literary evaluation. The traditional idea of the solitary newspaper critic, steeped in the literary canon, dispensing judgement from Olympian heights to a culturally inferior, silent and anonymous readership has gone. In its place we are witnessing the rise of book reviewing as, in the words of Will Self, ‘more a conversation than a series of declarations’ (2013). Amazon customer reviews, literary blogs, library self-­‐cataloguing sites, and online fora attached to television book clubs incubate a culture of vigorous, multivocal and ongoing popular literary evaluation in which critical capital cannot be assumed but is up for grabs. Such developments throw a harsh light on the relationship between academic criticism and book reviewing. The academy has long evidenced surprisingly little intellectual interest in the cultural institution of book reviewing. Furthermore, the subjective and specifically affective responses to books common amongst amateur book reviewers highlight by contrast how academic literary criticism has long striven to relegate emotional response to the periphery-­‐-­‐-­‐a critical orthodoxy prevalent as much among New Critics as among post-­‐structuralists. In one sense mass amateur reviewing represents a dramatic democratisation of literary culture, and welcome evidence of public interest in matters literary. Yet, on the other hand, over-­‐easy equation of the internet with the popular risks naivety. Hosts of literary reviewing websites such as book retailers have a direct financial interest in book sales, risking preferential treatment for ‘positive’ reviewers. Literary bloggers derive free books and potential advertising income from book publishers in search of positive review coverage. More diffusely, shouldn’t the widening gulf between popular literary reviewing and professional academic literary criticism give us pause? How is it that a sizable proportion of amateur reviewers are so alienated by the opaque terminology and suspicious reading strategies institutionalised in English departments that they represent themselves by contrast as ‘true’ lovers of literature? Most pertinent to the conference theme, what is the status of affect in the emerging reviewing culture of the digital literary sphere? Clearly the days of the seemingly bloodless and dispassionate critic dispensing ‘objective’ verdicts on literary and aesthetic worth are over. But in their place have we entered an era of radical egalitarianism where any form of cultural credentialism is lost in the cacophony of online opinion? And what about the potential for detailed, reflective and reasoned reviewing in an online world privileging the short, immediate and easily rankable ‘starred’ review, a climate in which Gideon Haigh laments ‘ “liking” and “not liking” are the only options’ (2010). This paper analyses the phenomenon and implications of mass amateur book reviewing in the contemporary digital literary sphere and asks whether broadening an admitted previously narrow critical coterie necessarily requires wholesale abandonment of notions of cultural expertise. It suggests that acknowledging the long-­‐
banished affective impact of literary works needn’t reduce us to a digital world characterised by intemperate tides of gushing and flaming. Sashi Nair (University of Melbourne) Affect, Desire and Queer Ecologies in Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair Australian ‘mainstream’ history is invested in stories of failure and loss in the face of a hostile environment. These stories work to highlight the triumph and tenuousness of rural life, while simultaneously romanticising that life. Cultural and social interactions with, and responses to, the Australian environment are, in turn, informed by the historical experience of alienation from that environment. Less readily recognised are 52 the experiences of social and cultural alienation that result in a search for a place to belong -­‐ according to these narratives, both real and imagined, the search for belonging is grounded in identification with the physical world. The hostility of the environment may remain but it is recast as potentially transformative -­‐ no longer something to manage or conquer, the environment facilitates unexpected new interpersonal identifications and is itself a source of identification. This paper is concerned with the search for place that is enacted by the socially or culturally marginalised subject. That this search often fails is significant -­‐ while failure to ‘defeat’ the landscape is a feature of historical and fictional accounts of any settler society, this failure is rarely deemed productive. Central to my intervention into the study of queer affect and ecocriticism is the experience of national and cultural alienation, which resulted in attempts to ‘belong’ away from ‘home’. The failure of such attempts provided the impetus for the establishment of new relationships with ‘place’. I am interested in ‘failure’, then, as an experience that was also productive for the development of identity and of modes of representation – imagining new identities, communities and spaces brought them into existence. Work that has been done on ‘queer’ ecologies has pointed to the organisation of the ‘bush’ or ‘wilderness’ as sites of ‘heteromasculinity’. Yet this project will examine the Australian environment as a contested site, imagined as a place in which the subject who is ‘queer’ (in the broadest sense of the term) can enact a search for belonging. In this paper I will examine Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair (1979), arguing that in this novel, Australia at first appears sanitised, as gender non-­‐conformity and sexual ambiguity are relocated to a Europe that is perceived as less hostile to their expression in the lead up to the First World War. It is only when Eudoxia Vatatzes returns to Australia as Eddie Twyborn and heads for the ‘outback’ that a hostile, exotic Australian landscape provides fertile ground for queer representation. Eddie longs for a relationship with the ‘bitter landscape’, searching for belonging in the isolation of the bush. He feels a seemingly inevitable and inexpressible affection for his manager Don Prowse, who appears to have forged just such a relationship. The representation of homoerotic desire in Australia is tied to a unique configuration of failure and the unforgiving environment, and it transforms our understanding of the environment itself. James Phillips (University of New South Wales) She Stoops to Conquer: Oliver Goldsmith and the Stakes of Politeness This paper examines an eighteenth-­‐century play for its contribution to Enlightenment reflections on the meaning of politeness. The affective dimension of politeness lies in its irreducibility to a set of rules of conduct. Civility, which knows when and when not to overlook breaches, lends itself to being discussed in terms of a sociable affect. Goldsmith's characters lose the ground underneath them and commit gaffe after gaffe: if they are to recover a world in which they can at least believe they make sense to one another, they have to feel their way out of a kind of state of nature. It is a collective but heterogeneous effort. The pedagogic and civilising programmes of the Enlightenment contain an anti-­‐monarchical moment, since a society whose members have found a means to circumvent their disagreements through politeness does not provide the Hobbesian sovereign with a pretext for asserting his authority. Melville’s story “Bartleby”, whose central character makes of politeness a confrontation with commands, is read as a late reflection on the failure of this Enlightenment project to reconfigure society without sovereignty. 53 Sean Pryor (University of New South Wales) Mina Loy's Bliss: Affect and Form In this paper I will consider the relation of affect and poetic form in the work of the modernist poet, Mina Loy. Focusing especially on Loy’s early career in the 1910s and 1920s, I will argue first that Loy’s poetry endeavours to describe a range of affects, and second that this effort to describe is necessarily and self-­‐consciously at odds with affect that precedes language and cognition. The paper will then turn to examine Loy’s peculiar and experimental prosody, and speculate about the kinds of affect which poetic form might be said to capture or induce, independent of the particular poem’s particular themes, images, concepts. For this I will place Loy in the context both of her modernist contemporaries and also of her Victorian and Romantic precursors. I hope to conclude by reading a short section of Loy’s long poem, “Anglo-­‐Mongrels and the Rose” (1923-­‐
1925), and by asking how the affects of prosody compensate for, complicate, or clash with the affective content of the poetry. Ashleigh Pyke (University of Queensland) ‘Subjects of thought furnish not sufficient employment in solitude’: Gothic Sociability, Eighteenth-­‐Century Reading and the Affective Turn Replacing classical notions of the beautiful with the awe, darkness, solitude and terror of the sublime, the gothic is always strongly identified by an uncanny aesthetic, which is at once celebrated and condemned for the peculiar affect it has upon readers. As texts from this genre are primarily assessed on how successfully they achieve their desired reading affect, gothic fiction presents a problem for literary criticism that separates emotion from judgments of literary value. The affective turn is therefore particularly significant to gothic critique as it allows for studies that investigate the genre’s social and intellectual contexts, and the reading and writing practices surrounding such fiction. Given the increasing scholarly and public interest in the gothic over the last five to ten years, though, it is surprising that there are no studies that exclusively examine the social networks to which the gothic authors belonged, and the influence these relationships had on their aesthetic choices. As part of a larger project, this paper goes someway toward filling this gap. By canvasing the exchanges between early gothic authors, as well as considering their theoretical and critical writings, this paper aims to demonstrate that the social politics of the gothic literary circle had a direct impact upon the strategies chosen to create reading affect in gothic texts. Looking at paratextual material – the prefaces to fictional texts, essays, reviews, correspondence and journals – it can be seen that a key concern for gothic authors was how to best achieve reading affect. In negotiating the strategies they favoured or believed important to the makeup of the genre in this regard, gothic authors also position themselves strategically in relation to other authors. For example, in her preface to The Old English Baron, Clara Reeve contests Horace Walpole’s ‘defective’ method of eliciting terror in The Castle of Otranto, therefore challenging his power or authority to determine the production of gothic literary discourse and his control over ideological reproduction in future texts. Within an increasingly commercial environment, in which the professionalisation of writing produced a dichotomy between the marketability of popular fiction and the aesthetic value of literature, it was very much a case of whom you knew, not what you knew, that decided an individual author’s success or livelihood. These relationships will be shown to be generally more significant to the evolution of the genre, than has previously been considered, as they result in the development, or abandonment, of certain formal, stylistic and aesthetic elements that not only contribute to the production of gothic reading affect, but also allow for the characteristic 54 identification of the genre. Finally, consideration will be given to the implications of these relationships for the traditional modeling of the public and private spheres in the eighteenth century. This paper ultimately confirms that the gothic aught to be at the center of any conversation of literature. Susan Pyke (University of Melbourne) The Circling Bush This paper considers if less ‘man-­‐made’ environments have a particular role to play when hosting the banshee scream of feminist protest. This investigation begins with the premise that the unsignified scream articulates an affect that might not otherwise be freed. The banshee announces the death of silencing containment. I approach the questions to what degree the scream in the wilderness might offer a voicing out of new gender relations, through a feminist reading of the poetics of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I suggest the plea of the vanished and vanquishing Cathy is a banshee scream that batters against the containment of words. Her ghost-­‐woman scream ‘let me in’ creates a readerly affect which allows an amplification of the protest in this literary yet barely signified communication. This is demonstrated in Kate Bush’s performative wail to a circle of trees. Her plea to be ‘let me in’ is strident and persistent, as it echoes the scream of Brontë’s Cathy-­‐ghost. Bush’s literary reference circles patriarchy, the protest is undiminished. The ripple effect of readerly affect continues into the feminist dynamics of Christine Ardeef’s reference to Bush’s reference to Brontë’s words. In the film, Soft Fruit the protagonist, Nadia, playacts the scream ‘let me in’, voicing her discontent, her lack of fitting in. I then consider the affect in the repetition of these angry words from a neo-­‐
materialist perspective, wondering what role the surrounds might have on these different voicings of performative hysteria. If the scream approaches that which Irigaray calls a ‘source of energy that has not been coded’, then what is to be made of the signifier under the scream, this desire to be ‘let in’? Bush’s scream, Cathy’s wail and Nadia’s mockery create a cacophony of banshee protest which might be as much about being let out, as being let in. At this point I ‘let in’ the nonhuman. Kate Bush’s ghostly ‘let me in’ is a wailing wind that circles Emily Brontë’s posthuman poetics. When these shared words are transposed to Bush’s ‘red dress video’, and then stilled, Bush’s arms become branches and her lower torso roots into the ground. This material meshing, created through Bush’s dervish spin on the sacrament of Wuthering Heights’ afterlife, suggests a techno-­‐textual diffraction that has something of the intra-­‐action Karen Barad conceptualises. The differentiations between human and ‘other’ matter are immaterial. It may be that Bush’s lyrical lapwing dance hosts this transcorporeal moment. Bush’s Cathy performs the knotted subject, that wild woman that Elizabeth Bronfen argues transforms ‘anxieties and desires into somatic manifestations’. These mad-­‐as-­‐in-­‐angry women scream with and beyond the signifier with a productive unintelligibility that is, as the repetitions illustrate, both recognisable and amplifiable. I offer this idea gently, understanding the importance of moving on from the resistance of hysteria’s silence to a more defensive response, as outlined by Marta Caminero-­‐Santangelo. I argue for the power of resistance through the hysterical response, but I do not assert hysteria alone is adequate to achieve change. 55 Paul Rae (University of Melbourne) Woe is Me: The Subtheatrical Prompts of Happy Days Is it a blessing or a curse to go through life with Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) in your pocket? At seventeen, having worked on a production as a rehearsal prompt, I would naturally have said the former: I took great pleasure in the language, and it transformed my relationship with my grandmother. These days, routinely assailed by rueful recognitions of the aging process, I’m not so sure. In this paper, I use familiarity with Happy Days as a means of exploring what we might call the subtheatrical dimension of everyday life. This is not to be confused with theatricality or spectacle. The fact that certain practices, events and behaviours look like theatre and are recognized as such suggests they may not be the only or even the most important extra-­‐theatrical venues where theatre, for want of a better word, happens. If we wish to register the theatrical ground bass as it rumbles and reverberates through our selves and societies, we may more properly find it amongst those manifestations of theatre that do not attain sufficient distinctiveness as to be hived off from the general flow of expression and designated as such. Happy Days is a useful reference point here not only because it is, in its own way, so damn catchy, but also because it stages that very phenomenon. It is impossible to calculate with any precision the debts we owe to specific encounters, events and experiences – artistic or otherwise – in the formation of our worldviews, self-­‐
understandings and affective milieux. But to the extent that Happy Days offers an exemplary meditation on that very matter, I argue, it plays a distinctive role in bringing these considerations to our attention, and of shaping the ways we might think about them. Melissa Raine (University of Melbourne) Affect, Critical Reading and the Embodied Self A framework for understanding how the reading, affective subject is organized is indispensible to a productive discussion of how affect participates in the process of critique. Research from the field of embodied cognition finds that “higher” cognitive functions are grounded in the intertwined affective and motor processes of the self. Accordingly, reading -­‐-­‐ the process of making meaning from written (in this case, specifically literary) texts – is directly reliant upon the reader’s embodied, affective experience. How can such a model of embodied selfhood be incorporated into critical methodology? Guillemette Bolens’ The Style of Gestures will be considered as an innovative response to this challenge. Victoria Reeve (University of Melbourne) Bridging Gaps in Affective Space: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), created a stir among critics when it introduced a spatiotemporal disjunction in the form of a ‘pronoun slip’ that enabled the instancing of two different speakers in different timeframes through the same utterance. Tellingly, the utterance takes place upon a bridge linking two sides of post-­‐WWII Nagasaki. In this early novel, Ishiguro references British fascination with the Orient through the name of the narrator’s second daughter, Niki, which must be ‘modern’, according to her Japanese mother, and sound ‘Eastern’ according to her British father. A similar disjunction between culture and cultural mimicry prevails in Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), through overt reference to Ukiyo-­‐e—a style of painting depicting pleasure-­‐seeking activities. Ukiyo-­‐e translates to ‘floating 56 world’, which was the term applied to the pleasure district (in what is now Tokyo) during the Edo period; Ukiyo-­‐e artist Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower Over Shin-­‐Ohashi Bridge and Atake (1857) was reproduced in the impressionist style by Van Gogh in 1887 as Bridge in the Rain (After Hiroshige). Ishiguro’s use of the term ‘floating world’ together with the importance of the bridge in establishing an affective space linking the past and present, would seem to draw upon distinctions evident in the Hiroshige and the Van Gogh, the Van Gogh repeating the effect created through the naming of Niki. In this paper I argue that Floating World’s reliance upon the divisions created by the bridge and its correlates—pathways and corridors—enables the formulation of an affective space representing the gap between culture and cultural mimicry, between memory and understanding, and between past and present. Michael Richardson (University of Western Sydney) The Indeterminacy of Affect Affect is not only autonomous, but indeterminate. It’s hard to pin down, to point to precisely, to put one’s finger on exactly. Not quite sensation, not yet emotion, affect is that which bridges gaps, constitutes encounters, reshapes bodies. But how does such a thing become the practice or the subject of literary analysis? As a field of contemporary theory, affect’s virtue and challenge is its heterogeneity, an outcome of its emergence from multiple and disparate fields (Gregg & Seigworth 2010). Literature and affect are not necessarily an easy fit—scant literary theory is to be found among those diverse origins. Compared to the textual ontology of post-­‐structuralism, affect theory seems almost an outsider to the literary game. Its obvious antecedents have the aura of pre-­‐
Kantian aesthetics, long since discredited. Yet affect offers a way past the disembodied intertextuality of post-­‐structuralism while retaining its emphasis on instability, uncertainty and the fluidity of meaning. Affect returns the body to literature, but it does so with indeterminacy. This paper explores affect as an approach to literature that embraces indeterminacy and makes it a productive force. Emerging from the intersection of post-­‐
structural and psychoanalytic approaches to literature, trauma theory, with its focus on unknowable rupturings of experience, reveals both the limits of post-­‐structural approaches to analysis and the necessity of moving beyond psychoanalysis (Kaplan 2005, Bennett 2005). Rather than falling short of accounting for that which resists entry into language, affect precisely describes it. Affect’s value is not limited to trauma, but thinking about literary trauma in affective terms highlights how affect enables new understandings of the charged space between page and reader. Crucially, it does not seek to ‘resolve’ the unknowable, but rather to provide a way of understanding its forces, impacts, and enduring effects. This as made possible, as Brian Massumi (1996) reveals in his influential article “The Autonomy of Affect,” by the existence of affective intensities outside the subjects and objects to which we normally confine agency. Such Deleuzian conceptions have proven productive in film studies, where the importance of non-­‐verbal elements makes clearer the limitations of intertextuality. Paradoxically, bringing affect to bear on literature calls for an analogous (although by no means equivalent) de-­‐emphasising of words themselves, and an embrace of form and the unwritten as having crucial force in the production of affective meaning. Where post-­‐
structuralism ascribed the indeterminate to the inherent instability of signs, this paper argues that affect is valuable precisely in its embrace of the indeterminacy of meaning that occurs between reader and text in the act of reading. This indeterminacy is not simply linguistic, it resides in the autonomous relations that are the stuff of the body’s encounter with the literary text. The indeterminacy of affect is not only the uncertainty of meaning in literature, but the inescapable force of that instability upon the reading body. 57 Sarah Richardson (University of Melbourne) ‘Phoebe “Never Gets Over Anything” Gloeckner’: Trauma and Productive Shame in two Comics Working across a variety of visual and literary media, Phoebe Gloeckner’s texts trouble the borders of autobiography and fiction, of genre and of the intimate and the luridly violent, but they always return to the representation of the areas of women’s lives that usually go unwitnessed or are hidden, placed out of sight: the literally obscene. Gloeckner’s ‘”shameful” work’ narrates formative encounters with violence, trauma and – in what may or may not be life writing – self-­‐realisation. Her 1998 collection of shorter comics, A Child’s Life, is framed, through its Introduction and Foreword, as well as their accompanying portraits of Gloeckner, as a text which reveals personal histories of shame. Two comics in particular, ‘Fun Things to do with Little Girls’ and ‘Minnie’s 3rd Love or “Nightmare on Polk Street”,’ narrate Minnie’s (Gloeckner’s ‘visual analogue,’ if not her direct biographical avatar) experiences of sexual violence, desire and humiliation. Gloeckner’s work in publically presenting these narratives of gendered violence (her most recent work concentrates on the femicides in Ciudad Juarez) and complex, compromised female sexuality evokes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s understanding of shame as potentially productive, rather than as a paralysing end to interest and experience. Sedgwick follows Silvan Tomkins, who characterizes the experience of shame as an encounter with strangeness, particularly when one is expecting familiarity. Shame is an affect of disorder. Gloeckner’s protagonists are shamed when their parents punish and humiliate them, alienating them, when they expected, if not needed, kindness and protection. As shame is a result of isolation, of a failure to connect, these texts instead testify to experience, voicing it in a cultural void characterised by the silencing of women’s voices and experiences, and work towards a sense of community and identification. Gloeckner employs various strategies that exploit the hybrid nature of comics to register trauma and shame. The title panels of ‘Fun Things’ and ‘Minnie’s 3rd Love’ depict the adult Gloeckner gazing directly out of the page. Her stare, respectively bitterly accusatory and warmly associative, invites the reader – and, like in her 2002 autobiographical novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s dedication, ‘all the girls when they have grown’ – to identify with these shamed (and shaming – the reversed, accusatory gaze turns upon the father figures who punished and humiliated these girl protagonists) narratives. The recursive, looping time structure and visual and linguistic rhymes in ‘Fun Things’ construct a claustrophobic atmosphere in which patterns of violence repeat, and the aftereffects of trauma refuse to allow the author to ever ‘get over anything.’ The productivity of shame is often alluded to in critical theory but rarely specifically addressed. Instead of the crippling arrest of humiliation, these works ‘dramatiz[e] and integrat[e]’ shame (Sedgwick 44). Gloeckner’s work does not seek to move beyond shame, as such. As Sedgwick points out, acknowledging strangeness as the trigger for the experience of shame allows one to avoid the necessary association of pathos with shame, and therefore to potentially see this affect as one which may not always demand a resolution or cure. Monique Rooney (Australian National University) Earth-­‐Object: Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) and Melodramatic Affect Lars von Trier’s cinematic oeuvre (which includes such films as Dancer in the Dark and Dogville) brings together theatrical and filmic traditions and canvasses philosophical ideas about being, affect, language and metamorphosis. Von Trier’s European-­‐American crossover film, Melancholia (2011), idiosyncratically combines the affective power of the 58 Hollywood ‘woman’s film’ with the disaster movie: its central characters—two sisters—
encounter their differences to one another as a rogue planet hurtles towards earth, threatening the extinction of their world. It has also been described as a ‘music video’ and a ‘chamber piece’ and the latter designation particularly places it within a longer theatrical tradition. Continuous with melodrama (melo/drama, play with music) as it first emerged in the post-­‐Enlightenment era, I argue that Melancholia is a plastic version of a mythic story that moulds new and old elements, including its evocation of a theatrical or proscenium stage-­‐like setting , its use of computer generated images of outer space for its cinematographically spectacular ‘Prologue’, citations and re-­‐
enactments of Renaissance and other classical painting and a Wagnerian musical score, Tristan und Isolde. The film’s evocation of melodrama opens the possibility of reading it through Rousseau’s ur-­‐melodrama, Pygmalion: scène lyrique (written 1762; performed 1770)—about an artist’s beloved statue who springs to life on stage—and which dramatized the composer-­‐philosopher’s theorisation of the relationship between aesthetics, social relations and cultural transformation. In particular, Pygmalion enacts arguments made in Rousseau’s treatise, Essay on the Origin of Language (publ. 1781 but written in the 1750s), about the differing expressive capacities of sounds and images. My paper will read Melancholia as a melodrama that creates a (dis)unity of music and spoken word and that draws attention to a distinction between a language of affective immediacy or proximity (bodies that touch) and of distance (the spectacle of gestural bodies). In reference to Rousseau’s Galatea, and picking up on Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, my paper proposes that earth is Melancholia’s Galatea-­‐
object and a figure for thinking about a being that is both melodramatic and metamorphic. Stephanie Russo (Macquarie University) Importing French Fashions: Mary Robinson, Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution Mary Robinson and Marie Antoinette met in a visit to France undertaken by Mary Robinson in 1781. Robinson was credited with importing the French Queen’s robe a la anglaise into England, and at the end of her life Robinson was to describe their encounter in terms of rapturous mutual admiration, even though the two never spoke. In Robinson’s account, she and Marie Antoinette wordlessly admired each other’s clothing and accessories, and this precipitates an intense reciprocal emotional connection. Robinson and Marie Antoinette have an immediate mutual sympathetic response to the other, and this sympathetic response is grounded in the language of fashion. Robinson went on to idolize Marie Antoinette in poetry and prose, transforming her from the sexually insatiable and monstrous spendthrift of French political pornography into the ideal bourgeois wife and mother. However, Robinson was also well known for her enthusiastic and ongoing support for the French Revolution. In fact, Robinson skilfully uses her belief in revolutionary ideology to rehabilitate Marie Antoinette’s image. Mary Robinson’s affective response to the Queen not only reflects her attempt to reconfigure her own public identity, but is indicative of the ways in which Romantic female writers were able to use the image of Marie Antoinette in order to comment on the relationship of fashion and materiality to female power. I argue that the stories of the heroines of Robinson’s novels can be read as correctives to the story of Marie Antoinette: moving forward from the execution of the Queen, Robinson suggests, it is (or should be) possible for a woman to maintain a public profile, while also as fashionable, and exemplary in the domestic arena, as Robinson’s representations of the French Queen. 59 Luke van Ryn (University of Melbourne) Dwarf Fortress: Homestead and Laboratory The ‘fortress simulator’ game Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12 Games, 2006-­‐present) allows players the space to conduct experiments with an economy, without granting them a body. The player is not granted an avatar in the world, and retains only an immaterial presence, but this does not mean that the player is granted the role of a transcendent deity either. Instead, the player operates on the relational level – completely managing all economic interactions, and assigning social codes to different spaces. This different type of play in Dwarf Fortress is hostile to new players because it lacks a strong didactic pedagogy. Lacking a ‘win’ condition, players are free to engage with the game however they wish, including allowing for the immediate and unsympathetic demise of the community. As play continues, Dwarf Fortress ceases to be a fortress, and instead becomes what the autonomists describe as a ‘laboratory’ (Hardt, 1996). The social relations of the factory become upturned, and the site of the domination of labour becomes the site for experiments in production. The fortress too becomes the site for thought experiments on alternative economies; as a text that has multiple versions and modifications in distribution, it contains not one, but many social laboratories. Laura Saxton (Australian Catholic University) ‘God, I Hate Her’: Affect in Twenty-­‐First-­‐Century Representations of Anne Boleyn as Stepmother The second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn has been a perennial figure in fictional and nonfictional historical narratives since her execution in 1536. The majority of twenty-­‐
first-­‐century authors consider Boleyn to have been innocent of the treason, adultery and incest for which she died, yet they regularly argue that her own misconduct created an environment in which her enemies (and husband) were able to act against her. These narratives thereby present Boleyn as the agent of her own downfall, highlighting or inventing manipulative, cruel or deceptive behaviours that are, in turn, represented as self-­‐destructive. Representations of the combative relationship between Boleyn and her stepdaughter Mary provide an apt case study of this association between affect, character and culpability. The degree to which she is responsible for Mary’s misfortune varies between texts yet the depiction of Boleyn as vengeful and hateful is consistent; her interactions with Mary are characterised by frenzied speech and violence in the form of physical abuse and death threats. Affect, which here encompasses emotion, motivations and the reasoning that informs action, is thus central to characterisations of Boleyn as stepmother. Anne’s apparent prioritisation of her own ambitions above Mary’s wellbeing and relationship with her father is described in recent narratives as unnecessarily and incessantly cruel, and primary sources suggest that she repented her actions as she awaited execution thus explicitly linking her treatment of Mary with her downfall. The increasing antipathy with which Henry and the nobility viewed Boleyn was integral to the circumstances that led to her arrest, particularly with regard to Henry’s growing awareness of her manipulative and cruel behaviours. By directly associating this antipathy with Boleyn’s actions toward Mary, she is portrayed as having been responsible for her own death irrespective of the charges against her. Adopting a postmodern perspective, this paper will argue that representations of Anne Boleyn in twenty-­‐first-­‐century historical narratives necessarily construct affect and in doing so position her as having been responsible for the circumstances which led to her death. The past as it once existed is inaccessible, thus writers of historical narrative construct representations of the individuals and events about which they write, regardless of genre, audience or veracity. As such, this paper will examine recent representations of Boleyn as stepmother in both fictional and nonfictional histories, 60 including Eric Ives’ The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy, Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and Alison Weir’s The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn. These texts represent a range of genres, including academic histories, popular biography, literary historical fiction, and historical romance. In spite of the differing generic conventions, the shared difficulties associated with identifying and describing past emotion and demands of the narrative form means that these authors do not discover, but instead imagine, Boleyn’s affect and, in turn, contribute to the creation of her historical persona. John Severn (University of New South Wales) Menippean Discourse and Same-­‐Sex Desire in John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed This paper proposes a new approach to John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (c.1611), arguing that a reception of the play as an example of Menippean discourse reveals a plotline of male same-­‐sex desire overlooked by modern critics, but that theatrical evidence suggests was available to early modern audiences. Recent criticism has focussed intently on the play’s relationship to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, characterising Fletcher’s play variously as a revision, an adaptation, a sequel or a response to Shakespeare’s play. Consequently, The Taming of the Shrew is frequently and apparently unproblematically referred to as “the source” of Fletcher’s play. Nonetheless, while both plays have a central concern with gender roles within marriage, only three characters’ names are common to both plays, the personalities of the characters bearing them differ significantly in two of the three cases, and the plays differ in their settings, plotlines and literary texture. In the introduction to their recent edition, Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor usefully look beyond The Taming of the Shrew to suggest Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata as additional sources, or interlocutors, for Fletcher’s play. Nonetheless, this paper suggests that the richness of The Woman’s Prize has been obscured by an intense focus on male-­‐female relations as embodied in a small number of central characters, by a normalised conceptualisation of the relationship between The Woman’s Prize and The Taming of the Shrew – alone or in conjunction with other works – as one of thesis and antithesis, of source and revision/adaptation, and by a disregard for the literary and dramatic texture of the play. This paper suggests that a more productive approach to The Woman’s Prize would be to receive it as an example of Menippean discourse – a notoriously difficult form of writing to define, but one that, as theorists Milowicki and Wilson suggest, is characterised by a discontinuous style of mixture and mélange, both highly intellectual and ribaldly, grossly, physical, drawing on multiple literary traditions, and incorporating competing and often discordant allusions to other literary works. Approached in this respect, the multiple literary allusions and parallels in The Woman’s Prize – not only to The Taming of the Shrew, Epicœne, or The Silent Woman and Lysistrata, but also to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Virgil’s Aeneid, Petronius’ Satyricon and Plautus’ Mostellaria, amongst others – might be seen as instrumental, such allusions designed to provoke changes in register and to invite a range of changing interpretative frameworks for the audience. One outcome of approaching The Woman’s Prize as Menippean is that, taken together, a number of these literary allusions suggest a shifting, unstable plotline of same-­‐sex desire. In its ability to reveal – rather than represent denotatively – on-­‐stage same-­‐sex desire, Fletcher’s use of Menippean discourse resists the concretisation, commoditisation, containment and control that often accompanies theatrical representations of desire, and discloses itself as well attuned to desire’s fluctuating, unstable, disorientating, uncontainable nature. 61 Gavin Smith (University of Western Sydney) “The Emotion of Having a Thought” – Poetry as an Embodied Experience: From Robert Frost to Antonio Damasio “A poem” Robert Frost says “is the emotion of having a thought.” What Frost means is that a poem not only has mental qualities but physical qualities as well. Emotion, Frost appears to say, underpins thinking, and this is revealed to us in our experience of a poem – any poem. Our poetic experience, then, has embodied and not merely abstract qualities. The poetic experience is an embodied experience; moreover, it is an intersubjective experience because of its embodied nature. At first glance, this might appear a generous claim about an indistinct quote, but Frost is working on a deeply conceptual level. Frost was heavily influenced by William James, from whom he derived a framework of philosophical and psychological insights that underpins his poetics. Principal among James’s influential insights is the theory of embodied emotion; that is, emotions emerge from physiological processes. Emotions, in James’s conception, are not isolated “inside the head,” but are integral to human thought and experience. Poetry, as an experience, an embodied experience according to Frost’s prosody, engenders in the reader emotional, physiological changes as predications of thought. A poem, then, primes the reader for thought by subtly changing the reader’s body state. At the centre of both Frost’s poetics and James’s theory are the mimetic dimensions of emotion. Emotion is not only embodied, it is communicative, shared by virtue of its common embodiment in all humans. We understand emotion when we perceive it because we undergo the same physiological changes we are witnessing. Research into mirror neurons suggests that we do, indeed, “mimic” the emotional states of others. Antonio Damasio, whose work draws on James’s original theory, extrapolates this point through the notion of “the as-­‐if body-­‐loop.” Damasio identifies a discrepancy in James’s theory: its lack of a “supplementary mechanism” for triggering embodied emotional transactions abstractly. The “as-­‐if body-­‐loop” helps to establish the link between aesthetic experience, in this case poetic experience, and the physiological structures of emotion in an abstract domain of experience. In this paper I will triangulate Frost’s ideas about metaphor and prosody with James’s theory of emotion and Damasio’s notion of the “as-­‐if body-­‐loop.” I will show that, through the Jamesian connection, Damasio’s notion of the as-­‐if body-­‐loop helps to explain what Frost means by “a poem is the emotion of having a thought.” I will argue that the poetic experience is an abstract, “as-­‐if” experience, but one that is nevertheless grounded in the physiological basis of experience. Emotions help to qualify our experiences, informing us of how things are going for us in our environment, laying the grounds for higher reflective behaviour, namely thought. A poem, then, I will show, puts us in a frame of mind for thought by enacting emotional responses through metaphor and prosody as aspects of our supplementary mechanisms of emotional engagement. Patricia Juliana Smith (Hofstra University) "Popsies" and Pussy Galore: James Bond, the Profumo Affair, and the Zeitgeist of 1963 In 1963, D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, its decades-­‐long ban recently lifted, was gaining a newfound readership eager to discover what had been kept from them for so long. At the same time, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and their film adaptations were at the height of their popularity. Even so, the best selling book in Britain that year was neither a literary novel nor a spy fiction; rather it was a government document, Lord Denning’s report on the Profumo affair. For the entire year the public had been entertained by media reports detailing the sexual activities of John Profumo, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, and two 62 teenage showgirls (or, in Lord Denning's term, "popsies,") Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-­‐Davies, who were also connected with a wide cast of characters ranging from rich slum lords and Jamaican drug dealers to a known Soviet spy. The parallels between the adventures of the fictional secret agent qua superhero and the sexual misadventures of certain politicians and aristocrats are striking. In both cases, privileged middle-­‐aged men, supposedly defending the realm, engage in egregious sexual relationships with attractive and objectified young women as heterosexual masculinity drives Britain’s struggle to remain a world superpower saving the world from nuclear war between the US and the USSR. But here the resemblance ends. In the Bond novels and films, women are willing sexual objects in servitude to the protagonist; so compelling is his hypermasculinity that even a lesbian character such as the suggestively named Pussy Galore in Goldfinger changes her sexual orientation after one night with him—all in the name of making the world safe for British imperialism and male sexual prerogative. In real life, however, the ruling Tory government came crashing down after public revelations of the dalliances of Profumo and other prominent men with girls Lord Denning defined as “popsies.” Unlike Bond Girls, Keeler and Rice-­‐
Davies were neither impressed by their male counterparts’ virility, nor did they feel beholden to them in the name of national security. Abandoned when they became inconvenient, they did what no loyal Bond girl would do by selling their stories to the press, causing much political havoc and public entertainment. In this paper, I will examine the parallels between fantasy fiction (e.g. James Bond), respectable erotic literature (e.g., Lady Chatterley's Lover), and tabloid journalism as forms of narrative, as well as the affects and emotions of titillation and schadenfreude they create in the public sphere. Russell Smith (Australian National University) Benevolence, Eroticism and the Sentimental Encounter: Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Samuel Beckett’s The Calmative For Christopher Nagle, the essence of Sensibility is its ‘eroticized benevolence’: in its ‘valorization of feeling regardless of circumstance’, sensibility constantly blurs the boundary between socially-­‐sanctioned forms of feeling such as sympathy and benevolence, and morally questionable states of emotional excess, erotic excitement and promiscuous intimacy. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is ‘the most significant and influential progenitor of Sensibility’ precisely because it is ‘the first work of the age to embody Sensibility in all its wealth of ambiguous expressions’. This paper seeks to use Nagle’s account of the queer eroticism of sensibility as a way of reading Samuel Beckett’s postwar novella Le Calmant/The Calmative. In Beckett’s story, the narrator’s awkward encounter with a young boy holding a goat by the horn not only reproduces various textual details from Yorick’s encounter with Maria in A Sentimental Journey, but more importantly invokes the queer sensibility of the eighteenth-­‐century ‘man of feeling’ in search of ‘an encounter that would calm me a little’. Lisa Smithies (University of Melbourne) Writing DNA: How Does Human Behavioural Biology Influence Creative Writing? Cognitive linguist Mark Turner proposes a “new common ground for the profession of English: The analysis of acts of language including literature, as acts of the human brain in a human body in a human environment which that brain must make intelligible if it is to survive” (1991, vii-­‐viii). My research follows Turner’s lead, taking a creative writing perspective, to argue that creative writing is a product of the human brain, and, as such, the principles of behavioural biology can be as usefully applied to the study of creative 63 writing, as they are to the study of other human behaviours. When we write, we write using the evolutionarily determined cognitive capacities of our species. These cognitive capacities operate within our embodied brains, which are influenced by a myriad of environmental factors, including culture. Recent research in cognitive neuroscience is allowing greater access into the workings of the human mind, and literary theorists are utilising this research to examine literature in new ways, specifically, how and why we cognitively engage with the language of fictional texts. It is now clear that cognition has an indisputable relationship to emotions, not just in literature, but within our everyday reasoning; therefore, ‘The Affective Fallacy’ has proved to be a fallacy in itself. Literature is also a brilliant example of our innate cognitive preoccupation with patterns of information, particularly those available in language. My work takes the cognitive linguistic perspective to argue that when we write we engage in an activity that uses natural cognitive abilities in a very natural way. Mark Steven (University of New South Wales) Not Sappho, Sacco: Communist Affect in Muriel Rukeyser’s Theory of Flight Muriel Rukeyser conceives of the poem as an integrated system of incalculable intensities. For her, poetry participates in an economy whose currency is affect. “Exchange is creation,” she writes: “In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions.” If affect describes the manifestation of unnamed energies, cohering with the body but resistant to discursive codification, and if the poem is a machine made of affect, then poetry will have mobilized those peculiar energies for the production “change.” For Rukeyser, meaningful change could only be revolutionary, and motivated by the desire named communism: “we go to victory,” she would insist, “in a commune of regenerated lives.” But the singular, human energies with which her poetry concerns itself are not just forces of political revolt and social upheaval; they are also, and just as frequently, the effect of sexuality. How, then, does poetry handle the interchange between these two radically difference energies? This paper proceeds from an argument that poetic affect facilitates the interpenetration of energies from otherwise autonomous situations. It describes how Rukeyser’s poetry lends itself to the admixture of sensations emanating from two very different bodies: the amorous body, and the political body; the body as aroused by desire and the body galvanized by political commitment. “You dynamiting the structure of our loves,” begins one poem, simultaneously inhabiting both the miners’ strike and the ecstasy of love: “embrace your lovers solving antithesis / open your flesh, people, to opposites / conclude the bold configuration, finish / the counterpoint…” Coinciding with these bodies' embrace is a conflation of the paradigmatic forms that should attend them; the document, the manifesto, and the slogan are all given to appear, thrillingly, within a sapphic meter and its variously erotic frame. The result of this admixture is a poetic form that is both feminist and communist—the inauguration in literature of what Simone de Beauvoir would later describe as the cornerstone of a truly socialist ethics, an aesthetic built on the realization that “there is in eroticism a revolt of the instant against time.” 64 Nick Strole (University of Illinois at Urbana-­‐Champaign) Reconfiguring and Performing Emotions Passed: Image and the Performative in Mouawad and Villeneuve’s Incendies This paper aims to analyze and contrast the way in which past emotions are reinterpreted through both performative language and images in Wajdi Mouawad’s play Incendies and its film adaptation, directed by Denis Villeneuve. In Incendies (2003), the second play in the tetralogy Le sang des promesses, the Québécois playwright Wajdi Mouawad creates a world where promises become verbal contracts. The play unpacks the mysterious and traumatic past of Nawal, a Middle Eastern woman whose story is retold as her two children investigate a side of their mother that, up until her death, had been silenced. Nawal’s voice resurfaces as she performs the horrors of her past for her children. Time becomes fluid in Mouawad’s theatrical structure, allowing two different scenes representing two different time periods to take the stage at the same time. Mouawad, then, is able to depict simultaneously both Nawal’s promise in the past and the realization of that promise in the present. In this way, promises hold a certain linguistic power for Mouawad’s characters who utilize performative utterances (as defined by J.L. Austin). The physical weight of words pushes characters to use them as weapons in order to engage with and manipulate their physical environments. These characters, therefore, rely on performative language as an act of unveiling the truth and the emotions of the past, no matter how traumatic. Thus, the play constructs a linear yet emotional history that can speak to the present. In the film adaptation of Incendies (2010), Denis Villeneuve does not allow Mouawad’s characters to penetrate temporal and emotional boundaries through performative language. Villeneuve takes control of his characters by separating them in every shot. His characters lack the performative power present in the play and must therefore be subjected to the deterministic narrative unraveled by the camera. Characters living in different points in time can no longer exist on the same stage—the camera places them in separate shots, denying them the opportunity to occupy the same time and space. Instead, Villeneuve grants authority to the spectator who must reconfigure the series of images presented in the film. Following Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the “movement image,” the spectator participates in the creation of emotional and narrative movement. The affect evoked in one framed shot, one image, is transformed as the spectator connects it to all the other images in the film. Emotions thus expand and penetrate the limits imposed by the framing of the camera. In this way, Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Incendies explores the spectator’s own performance in the creation and expansion of emotion. By contrast, in the original play, Mouawad empowers his characters with performative language that crosses both temporal and emotional boundaries in order to promote his vision of an inclusive and pluralistic world. Tyne Daile Sumner (University of Melbourne) The Electric Milker, The Wifey: Domesticity, Poetry and Cold War Anxiety This paper considers the ways in which specifically mid-­‐twentieth century American anxieties over cold-­‐war surveillance, nuclear threat, and the sanctity of the domestic realm surface in postwar American poetry about the home. The public emotions accompanying cold-­‐war anxiety represent an unprecedented moment in the affective history of the United States. Additionally, the poetry produced in response to and expressive of these anxieties reveals a great deal about the relationship between literature and affect, especially in war and postwar contexts. As a psychological state whose stimulus is often difficult to trace, anxiety is a mood that underpinned and uprooted the mid-­‐twentieth century notion of ‘Americanness.’ Most notably, the 65 denotation of anxiety as an affective hyperbole, that is insofar as it is not considered to be a normal reaction to a perceived stressor, reflects strongly the American government’s approach to surveillance, external threat, and the home during the Cold War. In response to this tumult, many postwar American poets explored the problems inherent in the American government’s effort to construct the family home as a sacred space, free from the iintrusions into private life that had become synonymous with threats to America’s democratic liberty. As the themes of many postwar poems suggest, the family home could also be a menacing channel for, and source of, personal expression. Speaking from within the home, these poets inverted America’s obsession with domestic surveillance, revealing the paradoxical and often frightening double-­‐bind generated by an overemphasis on security. Many poems respond to the proliferation of material (governmental and otherwise) that served to emphasize the need for post-­‐war America’s strength and security through the repeated ‘do, or else’ imperative. Ironically, repetition of claims like ‘we must stand together with all our neighbours, with no fear, no panic, no confusion,’ which were meant to inspire camaraderie and confidence in national defence, only made it seem as though an attack was inevitable. An excess of pathos aimed at dissolving anxiety only worked to intensify it. Thus, as many postwar poems reveal, the American government’s attempt to promote domestic security and sanctity as a weapon against communism—examples include barbecue culture, consumer spending, home wares advertising, the ‘DIY bomb shelter’—only worked to reinforce the anxiety it was attempting to ameliorate from the start. Importantly, many postwar poets rejected the correlation of national, social, and individual security with the consumption that household expenditure and ‘improvement’ signified. Thus, in their work, they appear to argue that the postwar period’s economic growth resulted not from an array of practical choices but rather from a forced commercialism that capitalized on postwar anxieties and insecurities. For example, as Elaine Tyler May suggests in Homeward Bound (1988), ‘consumerism in the postwar years went far beyond the mere purchases of goods and services. It included important cultural values such as patriotism and security, demonstrated success and social mobility, and defined lifestyles.’ Similarly, Vance Packard in the Hidden Persuaders (1959) argues that these collective postwar anxieties were both the vehicle for sales and the product being sold, advertisers moved more goods by ‘successfully manipulating or coping with our guilt feelings, fears, anxieties, hostilities, loneliness feelings, inner tensions.’ The extent to which postwar poetry examines and reiterates these anxieties through its often scathing examination of the home as a ‘psychological fortress’ is thus an important consideration in the affective history of cold-­‐war America. Zoe Thomas (La Trobe University) The Siren Song of Affect: Nostalgia as a Vessel for Autobiographical Practice Writing autobiographically involves negotiating memory and imagination to find ways into words and produce a subjective narrative. It is often concerned with making some sense of the author’s feelings about her or his lived experience. This paper is chiefly interested in modes of production for the literary practitioner within the life-­‐writing realm. It seeks to investigate specifically how nostalgia and affect may open up productive pathways for writers. Although affect theory is understood to be a complex and fraught subject of inquiry, it is the newer stream – sometimes referred to as the “affective turn” – which this paper will use as its point of entry. Nostalgia, with its pathologised history, can be described as an affective mood that not only elicits conscious memory reproduction but can also be powerful enough to produce autonomic responses. William Mazzarella contends that the affective body ‘preserves the traces of past actions and encounters 66 and brings them into the present as potentials.’ He refers here to the work of Brian Massumi, whose seminal work on affect explores experiential “traces” which can manifest as “autonomic repetition” (2012: 292). It is this condition of the affected body – with its shimmering, quivering, aesthesis from the past – that holds great promise for a means of accessing repositories of story. With its indeterminate boundaries that allow, and sometimes insist, on interdisciplinary movement, this paper will also look to the pioneering work of Eve Sedgwick, who advocates and agitates for a critical engagement with emotions and the body. It will examine her affective notions of “beyond”, “beneath” and “beside” in partnership with the “in-­‐between” and examine how these indeterminate spaces can contribute to the writing process. Furthermore, if these affective spaces are valuable for the autobiographical writer (who must render them, somehow, perhaps, with language) then this paper will question whether a symbiotic liaison between nostalgia and its affect may deliver some valuable insights for autobiographical methodology. By engaging with the affective ‘force or forces of encounter’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2009: 2), this work also hopes to move nostalgia beyond its initial determination as a bateau for romanticisation and transmutation and probe whether it can also function as a facilitator for autobiographical praxis. Affect and memory also partner in crucial ways to produce the autobiographical act, so if it is, in part, the job of the writer to not only reveal elements of the past but also to elucidate ‘the vaporous evanescences of the incorporeal (events, atmospheres, feeling-­‐tones)’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2009: 2), then it is surely worth examining the causalities of the relationship between autobiography, nostalgia and affect. Finally, it must be addressed that the seductive (at times potentially fatal) nature of nostalgia can also be a hindrance for memory and reflexive narrative. This paper will therefore consider something of the dangers of reading and writing nostalgically. This paper will engage with autobiographical work that (re)cover experiences of childhood. Primarily it will consider ‘A Sketch of the Past’ by Virginia Woolf – whose rich memorious text draws on the recollective power of the senses and is a lyrical case study for affect – and Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, whose portrait of restrained nostalgia is an excellent example of a writer’s evocative engagement with the past. Ling Toong (University of Melbourne) The Great Singaporean Divide: The Dialectics of Absenting Affect in the Works of Catherine Lim Catherine Lim’s iconic representation of the Singaporean idiosyncratic in her collection Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore showcases characters who embody literal and absolute meaning through pragmatic behaviour. Her stories express and reflect the period’s maturation and consolidation of the nation’s ruling “pragmatic ideology” in organising everyday lives (Chua). Written in 1978, during a period (1965-­‐1990s) described by scholars (Poon, Holden, Lim) as the “the economic and social, cultural and political coming of age of Singapore”, Lim articulates a normativised pragmatic busyness as affectless defence against instability. Lim’s stories defer affect in order to generate irony. Her tales of everyday pragmatic busyness are stories of misery, ignorance, helplessness and obsession which are told in a detached reportage style. Her impassive ‘observation’ of her characters who unbeknownst to them, are foils in their own stories (whose central protagonist is in fact, the alleged ironic twist at the end) raises the question of the status and value of affect as absent referent. Is irony used to mask affect out of fear or reluctance to engage? What is the significance of affect which circulates as an absent referent? The lack of affect in Lim's poetics replicates the problematic social life which she depicts in her stories, enacting the challenge of introducing affect for which there is no public language or conceptual space. The lack of affect not only 67 highlights the failure of alternative expression but falsely declares an inherence of pragmatism in everyday Singaporean life experienced as real, natural and inevitable, instead of structural and ideological. Is affect as absent referent a deliberate literary strategy or product of clumsy writing, failed authorial intent, or even an unconscious enactment of pragmatic ideology? While the reception of Little Ironies has been varied, Lim is often described as “the doyen of Singaporean literature”, praised for her accurate portraits of everyday Singaporean life. Do readings and reviews of her work misread her authorial intent? Do they miss the signs of radical critique due to their own ideological conditioning? Or is praise for her accurate representations an ideological affirmation, an unquestioning, interaffective call and response to the collective identification and normativisation of pragmatism as rhetorical and discursive markers of Singaporean identity? In 1994, Lim published two opinion pieces in the state-­‐run broadsheet the Straits Times, asserting that an “affective divide” existed between the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and its people. She described the government as “deficient in human sensitivity and feeling”. PAP members responded with threats and violent metaphors, which eventually drew a written apology from Lim. This encounter displayed an affective performance of gender and social roles. Lim’s humble supplication performed a self-­‐censorship of emotion as political strategy, appearing calm and measured in contrast to the seemingly pugnacious PAP. Performed (simulated) affect from both sides is a hyperbolic, even ironic enactment which reinstates affect as a site of deferral and vehicle of pragmatism in both Singaporean politics and literature. This paper discusses the ambiguous role, status and value of affect in literature and pragmatic society. Elizabeth Towl (Victoria University Wellington) “Hi thole this ded for thine sake”: Explaining the Atonement in Two Middle English Devotional Texts Before literary criticism attempted to evaluate the effect of the affect, and before Wimsatt and Beardsley declared such evaluation fallacious, there was affective devotion. This devotional approach flourished across Catholic Europe, particularly in the latter centuries of the medieval period. Affective devotion sought to utilise the emotions in order to foster devotional engagement by playing upon the shared humanity between the devotee and Christ, and often between the devotee, Christ and Christ’s mother. The relationship between Mary and Christ, human mother and human child, modelled the perfect maternal/filial relationship and fuelled the emotional fire that burned in accounts of Christ’s Nativity and his Passion. The traumatic rending of mother from son at Calvary was particularly fertile ground for affective devotion, and consequently, for the texts that supported this form of devotion. The mother’s reactions—which ranged from preternaturally quiet, stoical resolution in some texts to raging, raving, swooning and lamenting in others—
encouraged the devout reader to engage with the drama of the Passion and the mystery of the Atonement, but also with the pain experienced by the Virgin Mary herself. Mary’s suffering at the foot of the cross was both mariologically important (because of the Blessed Virgin’s role as co-­‐sufferer with Christ during the Passion and as mediatrix between Christ and humankind thereafter) and devotionally expedient. This paper considers two texts set within the context of mitigating or controlling Mary’s pain. The first, the well-­‐known lyric “Stond wel, Moder, under rode” (NIMEV 3211) opens with Christ’s request that Mary “bihold thi child wyth glade mode” while he saves mankind. The second, the less well-­‐known prose text “A Doctor of the Church on the Compassion of the Virgin” (extant in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. 6. 33 and Cambridge, Magdalene Pepys 2125), is predicated on Christ’s intuition that Mary’s love for her son will cause her great pain, but that that pain will be greater if she is not 68 forewarned of the circumstances under which he will be sacrificed. Both texts allow the devotee to eavesdrop on conversations between Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and so the devotional triangle of Christ, Mary and the devout listener is apparently unmediated. In “Stond wel, Moder,” this conversation occurs while Christ is affixed to the cross, while in the “Doctor of the Church” text, the conversation occurs prior to the events of Passion, in the politically charged days immediately prior to Christ’s arrest. The two conversations are strikingly parallel in some of their detail, although their structure, tone and context are different. In each case, Mary raises reasonable objections to the vicious nature of Christ’s death and to the necessity that she herself participate in it—objections, indeed, that might occur to the devotee—and Christ explains why this death, in this way, must be. Stephanie Trigg (Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne) 'A glance of brightness': Facial Expression and Emotion in Jane Austen This paper considers the trope of the “speaking face” in Jane Austen’s fictions, when the expression on a face is described as if it spoke directly, “as if to say…” This trope, which has a long history going back to medieval literature, is one of a number of means Austen uses to convey unspoken — and sometimes unspeakable — thoughts and emotions. The paper will examine Austen’s varied use of this trope, paying special attention to its implications for the individual and collective understanding of gender, and the private and public expression of emotion. My title comes from the moment in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth looks at Anne Elliot and “gives” her a “glance of brightness which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, — and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.’” Another intriguing example appears in Emma: “The ladies here probably exchanged looks which meant, ‘Men never know when things are dirty or not;’ and the gentlemen perhaps thought each to himself, ‘Women will have their little nonsenses and needless cares.’ In this second example, Austen draws a contrast between the exchange of (speaking) looks between the women and the private thoughts of each man. The paper will examine these and other examples more closely, to interrogate the gendered, affective discourse that is attributed to the faces of both men and women in her fictions. Further, I will suggest that this trope might be understood as a complex rhetorical version of what William Reddy describes in The Navigation of Feeling as an “emotive”: a first-­‐person present-­‐tense expression that is neither simply constative nor performative, but which nevertheless does perform emotional work of some kind. For Reddy, emotives such as “I love you” emphatically do things in the world, in what we may call a form of emotional practice. What does this trope of the speaking face do? Using these and other examples from Austen’s fiction, I will tease out some of the implications for the role of imaginative writing in the history of emotions, and the importance of narrative attempts to put emotions into words. In contrast to many physiological or taxonomic studies of the emotions that work by linking a single indexical word (for example, fear or anger) to a particular arrangement of facial features, complex narratives like novelist fictions can tell us a great deal about how emotions were perceived, expressed, and interpreted in precise social and cultural settings. This paper is part of a much larger project in which I plan to examine the history of the speaking face in English literature. I have set up a Google form in which I am inviting readers to contribute examples of this trope from their own reading, as the first step in a larger project that will search digital archives of literary texts to build a more comprehensive picture of the history of this trope. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TZY6VHOKHtA4N7mYjqJlhmrpR6wa9Mr9KMjO1h7M5P4/edit 69 Lindsay Tuggle (University of Sydney) “Phantoms of Countless Lost”: Amputation and Affect in Walt Whitman’s War Prose The frequency of Civil War amputations led to an epidemic of phantom limbs, a diagnostic term coined by Whitman’s post-­‐war physician, Silas Weir Mitchell, who debuted this neurological theory in an 1871 article detailing the phenomenon he described as a “sensory ghost.” In January 1864, Whitman witnessed the amputation of Lewis K. Brown’s left leg. During the preceding sixteen months at Armory Square Hospital Brown had become Whitman’s close friend, and quite probably his lover. The poet documented the neurological consequences of this severance: “[Lewy] could feel the lost foot & leg very plainly. The toes would get twisted, & not possible to disentangle them.” Phenomenologically, the phantom limb manifests as a physical presence felt most acutely in its absence. Whitman’s libidinal investment in amputees mirrors his poetic fascination with erotic-­‐linguistic vacancy. His reverence toward partial bodies demonstrates an attachment to the process of loss, through which profound intimacies are formed. Like the ghostly pains of the amputee, Whitman inevitably returns, “in dreams’ projections,” to the hospital corridors. The poet seeks to psychically resurrect soldiers’ abandoned bodies and detached parts. Whitman’s “specimen cases” borrow from contemporary medical rhetoric to chart the evolution of a unique category of “beings”. The term “homo-­‐sexual” first appeared in English in a translation of Krafft-­‐
Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in 1892, the year of Whitman’s death. The poet’s appropriation of words such as Phrenological “adhesiveness” for masculine same-­‐sex desire, “specimen” for subject of erotic curiosity, and “comrade” for lover or friend, are attempts to construct a nomenclature that could fill that void. Memoranda’s collected observances represent an epistemological study in keeping with Foucault’s historicity of homosexuality: “The nineteenth-­‐century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.” Whitman offers a unique perspective on the evolution of this anatomy: he views queer morphology through reverential, rather than diagnostic, eyes. For Whitman, mourning is an open-­‐
ended attachment that transcends the physical presence of the body. The phantom limb manifests as a tangible void, a neurological link to the lost part. Phenomenologically, it is emblematic of Whitman’s devotion to the wound as a corporeal enclave of vacancy. Building on Derridean theories of hauntology and Sedgwick’s concept of “erotic localization,” I interpret Whitman’s narration of the war’s “human fragments” as a discourse on the queer hospitality of “sensory ghosts” and their perpetually open wounds. Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney) Intertextuality and the Sense of Truth in Coetzee’s Dusklands This paper will examine the method of working with and between source and target texts in J. M. Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands, and consider the nature and implications of this method. The notions of translation and intertextuality will be addressed alongside an assessment of the implication that ‘truth’ or insight becomes available through interpretation. The paper will examine the relation between the first part of Dusklands ‘The Vietnam Project’ and the work of Herman Kahn on Vietnam, and the second part of Dusklands, ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee and The Journals of Jacobus Coetsé (1760) and Willem van Reenen upon which Coetzee drew in developing these works. It will further look at Coetzee’s theoretical and critical writings from the period in which Dusklands emerged in developing a reading that addresses the production of the sense or affect of truth in this work. 70 Ilona Urquhart (Deakin University) ‘Deceit, to the point of diabolism’: The Danger of Humbert’s Narration in Lolita Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) continues to provoke emotional responses to both the beauty of its language and the cruelty of the protagonist’s actions. Published only six years after W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley’s ‘The Affective Fallacy,’ the reception of Lolita by critics and the general public demonstrated the difficulty of avoiding affective criticism. Initially published in France because American publishers feared that the novel would outrage readers and incite obscenity charges, the novel’s eventual release in the United States begat negative criticism with an undercurrent of disgust, and positive reviews enraptured by Nabokov’s prose. One modern critic, Trevor McNeely, accused Nabokov of ‘diabolical cleverness’ in an article putting forward the view that ‘[t]he plot has one justification and basis only—to trap the reader.’ Indeed, Humbert Humbert’s unreliable narration is carefully worded as to tempt the reader to put aside their misgivings and sympathise with a paedophile and murderer. This paper explores how Nabokov overtly constructs his narrative as ‘diabolical,’ warning readers how language can manipulate their emotions if they do not read critically. However, the metaphor of the Faustian pact suggests that one only makes a deal with the devil because of the emptiness of the alternative, so that reading without regard for emotion is just as dangerous. Nabokov’s Lolita suggests that a reader should neither succumb to their emotional reactions nor reject them in favour of cold objectivity, but read attentively and compassionately. Prithvi Varatharajan (University of Queensland) Mediation of Affective Response in Vicki's Voice This paper will look at how Vicki’s Voice—a radio program on the late Australian poet Vicki Viidikas, broadcast on ABC Radio National in 2005—directs the affective responses of the listener, through sound. Sonic elements of Vicki’s Voice—such as an edited recording of the poet’s voice; an edited recording of an actor’s voice reading the poet’s work; edited recordings of Viidikas’ peers speaking about her and her writing; and sound effects and music—come together to guide the listener’s affective responses. The paper will consider both the role of the text and the role of the program’s producer in guiding the listener’s affective responses. It will also consider how attitudes toward affect in Viidikas’ poetry align or fail to align with its performance, and what effect this may have on the poetry’s remediated meaning. I will argue that Vicki’s Voice mediates affective response, and in so doing provides a template of response for the listener. This is perhaps another way of saying that the radio program is an interpretation or adaptation of the work, analogous to theatre “productions” of texts which present the audience with a performance of affect in response to a text. The audience’s engagement with the production may then be seen to contain a second-­‐level affective response: an affective response to the performance of affect/affective response. Formalism is implicit in this approach, as I am considering Vicki’s Voice as an object which guides or shapes the listener’s responses. In this view, listeners may have different responses to each other, but—due to properties of the text itself—some responses are more likely than others, within a particular cultural context for reception. I am thinking here of Western-­‐educated listeners, who largely constitute ABC Radio National’s target audience, and theoretical/critical texts on reader-­‐response that consider structural constraints for reception, such as Jonathan Culler’s “Literary Competence” and Patricia Smith’s “Icons in the Canyon.” I have so far gestured toward the text(s) and the listener, but what about the author? Does the “author” of Vicki’s Voice influence the affective responses of the 71 listener? To this end, I will consider Vicki’s Voice as a performance authored or curated by the producer of the program, using voice and sound. I will entertain the idea that the curated performance could be seen to mimic the producer’s own responses, as the producer would presumably not present a performance which is at odds with their own affective responses to the source text. The program’s listeners are then invited to participate in this performance of response, and perhaps to replicate it as the preferred one. This does not perpetuate the intentional fallacy, but rather considers whether intermediary “authors” or “curators” may shape affective responses, in the way that a theatre director may be seen to shape an audience’s affective responses, without however dictating meaning. Denise Varney (University of Melbourne) Visceral Affects and Disavowal in Contemporary Performance This paper considers Patricia Clough’s notion of ‘the affective turn’ as it applies to Theatre Studies through a comparative analysis of three productions: Hedda Gabler, directed by Thomas Ostermeier with Katharina Schüttler as Hedda (Viewed in Melbourne, 2011); Gross und Klein with Cate Blanchett as Lotte. (Viewed in Sydney, 2011); A Streetcar, directed and adapted by Krzysztof Warlokowski with Isabelle Huppert as Blanche du Bois. (Viewed in Adelaide, 2012) As Patricia Clough notes in her essay the turn to affect proposes ‘a substantive shift’ in critical theory to ‘bodily matter’ and the dynamism located therein (2010). Such dynamism in theatre concerns the flows of intensity, sensation, perception and impingements that circulate during performance and include performer and spectator. Live performance may serve as a privileged location for what Brian Massumi (2002) refers to the ‘primacy of the affective’ and is marked by ‘a gap between content and effect’. It is not that the arts free us from the symbolic order, as Clare Colebrook writes, but that affect in art ‘disrupts the everyday and opinionated links we make between words and experience’ (2002). Hence as James Thompson (2009) points out for the theatre, ‘Brecht’s startle or Benjamin’s astonishment’ are both the affect of the work and a starting point for critical enquiry. The performances I discuss provide contrasting examples of the theatricalised female hysteric but more particularly a new representation that evokes the creation and disavowel of affect. In the penultimate moments of the Schaubühne Hedda, Katharina Schüttler’s cool, postdramatic, contemporary Hedda Gabler navigates the stage with an apparent lack of affect and a distinct lack of force or intensity that matches a lack of ambition and desire. The performer appears unmoved by the great role she plays and the canonical status of the work by means of which she occupies centre stage. By way of contrast, in the final moments of Botho Stauss’s Gross und Klein, a non-­‐narrative, postdramatic work set in West Berlin in the 1970s, Cate Blanchett’s Lotte, stands downstage and silently weeps. Yet the tears fall without emotion suggesting affect is ‘enfolded’ into a body suspended in an affective state. Huppert’s world-­‐weary, ironic Blanche du Bois inhabits a body that jerks, ticks, shudders, writhes, howls and chatters with the intensity and apparent loss of cognitive direction of a body in shock. Web-­‐cam recorders project her enlarged face onto a screen behind her seated body. In the final moments, when Blanche walks across the corridor stage towards the doctor and nurse, she delivers the line — ‘I have always relied on the kindness of strangers’ — to the webcam. Defamiliarised and remediated, the moment is nevertheless powerful, shocking, surprising and intensively affective. There is no avoiding the weight of her circumstances, the nightmare of her life and her catatonic state. The paper will argue that in each case the spectator’s critical engagement is stimulated by an affective economy that destabilises conventional meanings of these works and opens up more progressive new readings. 72 Corey Wakeling (University of Melbourne) Hypnosis by Theatrical Temporality in Samuel Beckett's Theatrical Trilogy Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby Hypnosis can be seen as a repulsion from affect into sleep or dream, or at least what Isabelle Stengers explores as a kind of “deception” (‘The Deceptions of Power: Psychoanalysis and Hypnosis’, 81). However, at the same time Stengers is interested in hypnosis as an artefact of “false witness” within the assumption of “reliable witness” (83), what Brian Massumi, pace Stengers calls a minor, affective knowledge practice (Parables for the Virtual, 309). Beckett’s trilogy of plays Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby are three hypnotic dramaturgical events which I argue legitimise the affect of hypnosis as a minor knowledge practice of spectatorship. Indeed, further than legitimation, Jonathan Crary calls hypnosis “an extreme model of a technology of attention” (Suspensions of Perception, 65). Each play poses its own sensory problem for attention which is markedly temporal: i.) Not I’s speed of unintelligibility, ii.) Footfalls’ spectral trance-­‐
pace, and iii.) Rockaby’s metronomic, 20 bpm velleity. The design of these plays in Walter Asmus’s rendering at the Duchess Theatre in January 2014 extended the extremes illustrated in Beckett’s texts, through a fully blacked-­‐out theatre and the miniaturisation of the lit spectacle. The three plays’ narratives regard the dwindling memories of entranced characters. Importantly, witness become less reliable and more automatic in these plays the more entranced the characters appear. So, following Crary’s account of “focalisation” by hypnosis (66), I argue the “denuded mise en scène” (Stengers, 90) of these hypnotics brings into relief the unreliability of witness of memory shared by character and spectator as a theatrical reality. Freud abandoned hypnosis because he considered it an encouragement of his analysand Anna O.’s personality disassociation by day-­‐dreaming (Studies on Hysteria, 255). But, as an “extreme model of a technology of attention” where the spectator shares in a hypnotised day-­‐dream with character, the artefact of unreliable witness of memory is given spectacular reality. Scott Wark (University of Melbourne) The Technical Temporalities of Feeling in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is a difficult book to read. Composed through a process of cutting and erasing Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, the resultant die-­‐cut object flirts with the limits of intelligibility. Holes in the book’s pages allow words deep in the text to infiltrate the sentences on those pages’ surfaces, frustrating the relationship between reading and sense making. The impressionistic ‘Afterword’ to Tree of Codes provides its readers with the titular cipher needed to contextualise and to make sense of this strange object. A series of small sections link Foer’s text to several temporal moments: Schultz’s tragic and arbitrary murder as a Jewish prisoner of war held by Nazi captors; the miraculous, lone survival of his one extant book, Street of Crocodiles; the genesis of Tree of Codes and its process of composition; the looming contemporary obsolescence of the medium of the book; and, most touchingly, his book’s status as monument to all of the creative works lost in the tragedy of the holocaust. This code to Tree of Codes situates Foer’s text in several simultaneous temporalities: a lost past, an uncertain present, and a future that never was. This paper will unpack this afterword to tie together technology, time and feeling in Tree of Codes. Foer’s book will be used as a case study to make two interrelated points. First, that the material medium is essential to sense making processes in literature – where sense is understood, with Jean-­‐Luc Nancy, on a 73 continuum of feeling and meaning. This paper will argue that the multiple temporalities mobilised by this book can only be understood in relation to the physical deconstruction of its material medium. By materialising modernist modes of fragmentation, Foer’s book transforms reading into an engaged, embodied process. Its themes of dissolution, loss, absence and sadness are given objective form in the fragility of its pages, the anguished confusion of its intermingled chorus of voices, and the literal deconstruction of its medium through incision and erasure. Second, this paper will argue that the temporalities generated by literary texts are inextricable from their technical operations. Drawing on the work of Bernard Stiegler, Bruno Latour and others, it will assert that nonhuman technologies contaminate and co-­‐structure human perception.Tree of Codes’ material medium plays a constitutive role in sense and meaning making – in, that is, the composition of temporal envelopes of experience for its readers. The ‘meaning’ of the book – its status as monument – is secondary to the material process of reading that its physical form encourages. Reading – as a process of sense making – can only be understood in post-­‐phenomenological terms. Tree of Codes reminds us of the embodied nature of our engagement with literature. It also reminds us of the constitutive role that nonhuman technologies play in organising temporal regimes of literary experience – and literary sensibility, or both meaning and feeling. Anna Westbrook (New York University, Sydney) Relational Jouissance and the Erotics of Reading Queerly, or: “Something Like Orgasm Accompanied By Crying”? The relational or the social has been one of the most prominent sites of tension in queer studies over the last decade, particularly how the various interpretations of queer as a force of self-­‐shattering are often played against scholarship that focuses on queer ‘world-­‐making’ practices. This paper contends that the emotional dimension of literary jouissance, which opens psyche and body to others -­‐ hitherto overlooked in English translation, provides an occasion for an intervention in contemporary debates about queer relationality and parlays into Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative reading. By taking the grain of Jane Gallop’s rereading of jouissance in her 2012 essay, ‘Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion’, and advancing her hypothesis that jouissance émue is similar to orgasm accompanied or disrupted by weeping -­‐ this paper seeks to extricate jouissance from its familiar Lacanian-­‐Barthesian phallocentric model and discuss the possibilities of a rebirthed erotics of reading outside of both heteronormative and anti-­‐relational queer paradigms. Defining jouissance émue as an overrun of feeling that disrupts the cultural narrative of sexuality and displaces desire for the ‘proper object’, arrests the teleological trajectory of pleasure toward orgasm and allows the consideration of alternate models of desire and the integration of arousal into reparative readings. Following the trajectory of Sedgwick’s ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ this paper explores why the condemnatory charge of ‘mental masturbation’ so frequently levelled at academic research strikes ironically close to the mark. In an erotics of reading jouissance émue is construed as a heterogeneous and polymorphic field of erotic impulses not directed at desire’s proper (heterosexual) object, or even at any object. Gallop writes that Barthes’s “image of the author ‘lost in the text’ could also suggest that he is there but the reader cannot find him, cannot reach him. If the relation to the author is a relation to an other, it is a relation to an other who is always there but always lost, who cannot be discounted but cannot be reached”. In considering the dead author lost in the text, attendant but not forthcoming to entreaty, the weight is felt of Barthes’s claim that this absence, staged in language, is but a rehearsal of the other’s death: the reader is already, inevitably, in love with the dead. 74 This paper contends that jouissance émue might be conceived as feeling like Kristeva’s open wound, a wound that the reader must endure as a “corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental incompleteness: a ‘gaping’… like a crucified person opening up the stigmata of its desiring body”, and discusses the affects of jouissance émue: how coming and crying can be reading queerly. Kim L. Worthington (Massey University) Confronting a Forgotten Past: Shame, Guilt and Blame in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium (2013) Shame, guilt and blame: these emotions dominate in Jaspreet Singh’s haunting novel, Helium (2013). Singh’s narrator struggles to write about the Sikh pogrom that occurred in India following the assignation of Indira Ghandi by her Sikh bodyguards in November 1984. In the days and weeks after, thousands of Sikhs were burned alive, with the encouragement and support of government officials and police. The narratorial focus is though the perceptions of an Indian ‘returning son’ (from study and employment abroad) who witnessed the immolation of his beloved Sikh professor several decades earlier. He believes his now ailing father, a senior police officer, was complicit in the mass murders. In the painful reunion of father and son, personal meets national shame and blame; and reconciliation, if achievable, demands guilty recollection. The German language has a word for the struggle involved in coming to terms with past atrocities: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It arose in a 1960s culture in which “second-­‐generation” Germans (those not alive or very young during WWII) began to confront the heinous acts of their (grand) parents in Nazi Germany. The word suggests that what is needed is more than a rational assessment of past (inherited) crimes: an emotional confrontation is necessary. While Singh’s novel is set in contemporary India, my reference here to post-­‐war Germany is not arbitrary. The work of Primo Levi is alluded to throughout, and the elusive whole evokes the work of W.G Sebald. There is, however a striking difference between the German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and that undertaken by Singh’s “second generation” narrator (and Singh himself). Post-­‐war Germans face the task of (emotionally) confronting an acknowledged and memorialised crime of genocidal violence. In contrast, the central referent in Singh’s novel (the 1984 Sikh pogrom) is one that has all been erased from (official) Indian history. The murderers not only burned people, writes Singh in a recent essay, “they also burned Memory.” My discussion of the novel seeks to explore the complex relationships between memory (and forgetting) and the emotions of shame, guilt and blame. Inevitably, this also involves questions about the (im)possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness. I draw on Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History and Forgetting, particularly on the distinction he makes between what might be called genuine amnesia and wilful forgetting, and the later work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, to frame my reading of the novel. Jonathon Zapasnik (Australian National University) The Event of Sexuality: (Un)Reading Eric Michaels’ Unbecoming In this paper, I examine how we can understand the relationship between affect, memory and sexuality in Australian AIDS life writing, namely Eric Michaels’ posthumously published memoir, Unbecoming (1990). This research reflects my interest in thinking about sexuality as an assemblage of affective memory. Affective memory, according to Jill Bennett (2006), refers to the “real-­‐time somatic experience” akin to Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo’s “sense memory”, which designates the body’s capacity to register and recall the event through a series of subjective processes. This 75 notion of affective memory challenges the idea that memory is something capable of representation, emphasising instead memory as a dynamic and embodied process, incorporating the visceral sensations that prefigure our thoughts and actions. Here, memory is never singular, but only ever exists as a series of multiplicities that converge and diverge in a variety of unpredictable ways. Based on my reading of Michaels’ memoir, I propose that sexuality is one of the many categories of experience produced through embodied memory. In the Deleuzian sense, sexuality is an event that signals the ongoing making and unmaking of bodies and carries with it the potential for agency within the very context of its actualisation. This framing of sexuality as an event seeks to expand the work of Jasbir Puar (2007) and Amit Rai (2009), who similarly suggest thinking about sexuality in terms of its affective capacity between bodies and across time, rather than a signifier of identity. This requires us, as readers, to find new ways of understanding the literary text typically thought in representational terms. Indeed, as Deleuze (2000) notes, reading is not about finding the meaning in the text, but rather about grasping how the text functions. Drawing on Deleuze’s engagement with literature and the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) and Heather Love (2010; 2013), I propose a queer-­‐Deleuzian method of reading the literary text that is sensitive to the emergence of sexuality and the circulation of affects that produce its iterations. I will demonstrate the similarities between these potentially contentious approaches to the literary text and, ultimately, argue for the productivity of this tension through a “close, but not deep” (Love 2010) reading of Michaels’ memoir. 76