Department of American Studies

How can we understand, feel, critique, present and represent the affective dimensions of social, cultural and political worlds? How does public feeling relate both to structures of power and to emergent, personal experience? This class is an introduction to some of the important approaches to affect in contemporary social thought. The conceit of this class is that the form of writing is completely bound up in how we think about affect. We often move beyond traditional academic writing in this class. In some of our readings we find an explicit focus on the fact that while affect can be hard to pin down, it also can be engaged in the form it takes. This means writing is not imagined as a literalist, transparent index to an entirely separate domain, but rather as an expressive practice formally bound up in its objects.