Feeling Good as Progressive Practice

In the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American
literature and film, we are looking for theoretically informed essays
about affect and culture. We are especially interested in correcting the
disdain for and suspicion of feeling and in providing ways in which the
left can think about feeling as a means of resisting social, state,
institutional, and corporate exploitations of emotion. As part of that
line of inquiry, we would be interested in examinations of the
connections between the public and private experience of emotion. Of
particular interest are works that interrogate the intersection between
political activism and affect. To what extent do positive feelings
support the status quo? Is emotional labor automatically conservative?
Are there resisting uses for positive feeling? For example, sympathy
promises hope but is also alarmingly random and short-lived. To what
extent can it be developed without being coercive? Many recent studies
of emotion concentrate on the public uses and organization of feeling,
but some analyses of how the right uses feelings would be helpful in
order to think about how the left might do so differently; for example,
in constructions of positive emotion such as hope.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

* Affect and the academy
* Working at feeling, working against feeling, feelings at work
* Affect and bodies: contact, connection, warmth; the body as witness,
traitor, sign of feelings; issues of control
* Feminism and affect; women’s invisible emotional labor
* Marxist critiques of emotion; alienated emotion
* The use value of emotion versus the cultivation of feelings for their
own sake
* Affect and gender, race, and/or genre
* Nineteenth-century stage melodrama, silent films, and
twentieth-century cinematic melodrama
* The performance of feeling
* The polarization of affect and intellect; feeling and consciousness;
the rationality of emotions; feeling and agency
* Pleasure as resistance

Please send completed work, abstract, and c.v. by July 1, 2003 to Karen
Gindele and Elaine Roth / Department of English / Indiana University South
Bend/ 1700 Mishawaka Ave. / P.O. Box 7111 / South Bend, IN / 46634-7111 or
contact us at kgindele_at_iusb.edu or elaroth_at_iusb.edu

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Received on Fri Feb 21 2003 - 15:37:46 EST