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Speculative Affect: Objects and Emotions is an edited collection examining the intersection between affect and objects in the fields of literature, cultural theory, and cultural production. The word "speculative" in the title references recent philosophical and cultural work in the "speculative turn," a philosophical field that includes speculative realism, new materialisms, "thing" theory, or object-oriented ontology, where the object is analyzed apart from human consciousness and human use-value. By linking this return to an ontological object realism beyond human consciousness with affect theory's reimagining of corporeality by exploring attachments, bodily sensations, autonomic responses, and emotions as embodied forces beyond conscious knowing, this work addresses the last frontier in radically reconfiguring the status of human life - the division and hierarchy between so-called inert material and the apparent "superiority" of humanity.
List of contents
Section One: Introduction.- Chapter 1: Speculative Affect: An Introduction by Charmaine Eddy.- Section Two: Theorizing Speculative Affect.- Chapter 2: The Speculative Garden.- Chapter 3: Untimely Materialist Meditations on Affect.- Chapter 4: Does the Object Feel? Toward a Theory of Speculative Affect.- Section Three: Speculative Affect and Ecological Precarity.- Chapter 5: Tracing Waves.- Chapter 6: "It Would Be So Nice If This Were a Dream": Reading the Tohoku Earthquake through Affect Theory.- Section Four: The Affective Object of Art.- Chapter 7: Settler Imbroglios and Affective-Ecological Entanglements in the Work of Peter von Tiesenhausen, Kara Springer, and Jin-me Yoon.- Chapter 8: Nomadic Objects in Unhappy Lands: History, Memory, and Affect in Joanna Rajkowska's Public Projects Carried out in Warsaw (2002-present).- Chapter 9: Ontogenesis as Revolt: René Magritte's Universe.
About the author
Charmaine Eddy is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, where she teaches modern American literature, Black literary studies, and literary and cultural theory. She has published several articles on new materialisms and hoarding, including “The Art of Consumption: Capitalist Excess and Individual Psychosis in Hoarders” in Canadian Review of American Studies and “Trash and Aesthetics in the Hoard” in NANO: New American Notes Online. 'She also has a forthcoming monograph on William Faulkner, States of Racial Abjection: Writing the Liminal South in William Faulkner’s Later Fiction, accepted for publication by the University of Mississippi Press.
Summary
Speculative Affect: Objects and Emotions is an edited collection examining the intersection between affect and objects in the fields of literature, cultural theory, and cultural production. The word “speculative” in the title references recent philosophical and cultural work in the “speculative turn,” a philosophical field that includes speculative realism, new materialisms, “thing” theory, or object-oriented ontology, where the object is analyzed apart from human consciousness and human use-value. By linking this return to an ontological object realism beyond human consciousness with affect theory’s reimagining of corporeality by exploring attachments, bodily sensations, autonomic responses, and emotions as embodied forces beyond conscious knowing, this work addresses the last frontier in radically reconfiguring the status of human life – the division and hierarchy between so-called inert material and the apparent “superiority” of humanity.
