@UIUC: Critical Theory Fall 2007 Seminar: "Affect Theory" (Monday Evenings)

The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is pleased to announced its fall 2007 criticism seminar on "Affect Theory." This non-credit seminar is open to all interested faculty and graduate students. Readings for each session will be available either through e-reserves (Unit 2007/Rothberg) or as hard copies through campus mail. If you are interested in being on the Unit's seminar mailing list and receiving announcements about the seminar, please respond to this message. If you are interested in receiving hard copies of the readings, please indicate that and include your campus address, including mail code.

Please feel free to forward this to any faculty or graduate students who you believe will be interested in taking part in any of our activities. I will be happy to answer any questions about the seminar.

Best wishes for the new semester,

Michael Rothberg


Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory Seminar, Fall 2007: Affect Theory

Rage. Fear. Shame. Disgust. Love. Anxiety. Depression. Joy.

Why affect, why now? Fredric Jameson has claimed that we live in a time of “waning affect,” yet a growing number of scholars working within and across various disciplines have challenged this view. Especially since 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror,” affect has emerged as a key site of political mobilization and critical concern. Scholars such as Sianne Ngai in literary/cultural studies and Antonio Damasio in neuroscience are convinced that affect has anything but waned in our time and are now producing a formidable body of knowledge on a subject that was once considered too nebulous for serious study.

This Unit seminar approaches “affect theory” as an open and exciting interdisciplinary field—one that traverses both the humanities and the sciences. We will examine several questions related to affect theory and its rise. First and foremost, what is affect? How is it different from emotion, feeling, or passion? How does affect work across disciplines? Can we study affect historically? How are certain affects racialized or gendered? How do affects and affect-laden signs flow among bodies, human and non-human? How might one theorize a politics of terror and other affects? How do affects lend force to ideas and ideologies, to causes such as the anti-globalization movement or the recent surge of nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and other countries? Finally, what does affect bring to the study of theory and criticism? 

In conjunction with a Unit colloquium panel on “Affect Across the Disciplines” and a Unit-sponsored graduate student conference “Thinking Affect: Memory, Cognition, Language” (September 28-29), this seminar aims to create a space for dialogue among a wide range of disciplines, to address methodological concerns raised by affect theory, and to explore the political implications of affect.

Texts will be chosen from authors such as Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Teresa Brennan, Antonio Damasio, Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi, Sianne Ngai, Phoebe Sengers, Eve Sedgwick, Ann Laura Stoler, and Sylvan Tomkins. Other texts will be added depending on the interests of the group.

For more information or to be included on the Affect Theory seminar mailing list, contact Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism (mpr@uiuc.edu).

Schedule

All meetings will take place on Monday evenings from 8:00 – 10:00 pm at the IPRH Building, 805 W. Pennsylvania, Urbana unless otherwise noted.

September 10: Introducing Affect Theory

Lawrence Grossberg, “Mapping Popular Culture,” We Gotta Get Out of This Place (69-87, 409-10)

Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Parables for the Virtual (23-45, plus notes)

Sianne Ngai, “Introduction,” Ugly Feelings (pp. 1-37, 357-61)



Tuesday, September 18, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm, Place TBA: Special Session with Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago)

Lauren Berlant, “Love, a Queer Feeling,” from Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane

Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” from differences



September 24: Affect and Cognition

Kirsten Boehner, Rogério DePaula, Paul Dourish, and Phoebe Sengers, “Affect: From Information to Interaction,” Proc. 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing (2005), 59-68.

Antonio Damassio, “Introduction” & “Emotions and Feelings,” Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (xi-xix, 127-64, 269-70, 282-5)

Otniel Dror, “Counting the Affects: Discoursing in Numbers,” Social Research 68.2 (2001): 357-78.


Recommended:

Teresa Brennan, “The New Paradigm,” The Transmission of Affect (74-96, 182-88)



September 28-29: Thinking Affect: Memory, Language, and Cognition (Graduate Student Conference)


October 15: Shame, Fear, and the Politics of Affect

Sarah Ahmed, selection from The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, selection from Touching Feeling

Sylvan Tomkins, selection TBA



November 12: Historicizing Affect

William Reddy, “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 72:1 (March 2000): 109-52

Other readings TBA

Recommended:

Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107:3 (June 2002): 821-45.


December 3: Affect Across the Disciplines: A Panel Discussion

8:00 pm, Levis Faculty Center

Samantha Frost, Political Science and Gender and Women's Studies

Justine Murison, English

Gabriel Solis, Music

Yasemin Yildiz, German

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Michael Rothberg
Director, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Associate Professor, Departments of English and Comparative Literature
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
208 English Building, MC-718
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801 USA
telephone: (217) 333-2581
fax: (217) 333-4321