"The Affective Turn, 15 Years Later"
The Third Annual Meeting of the Alabama Symposium on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies
In 2000, Patricia Clough coined the phrase "the affective turn” to refer to a proliferation of scholarly accounts of biological, non-intentional aspects of feeling and human experience. Since then, the interdisciplinary field of affect studies has emerged as an influential subfield in literary studies, particularly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. Situated at the intersection of critical theory, neuroscience, literature, history, and cognitive psychology, affect studies has renewed emphasis on the emotions, which experienced relative marginalization in scholarship in the late twentieth century. The centerpiece of the third annual meeting of the Alabama Symposium on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies is an effort to ask where we are now in affect studies. The meeting is intended both for newcomers to this rich field and for scholars with longstanding investments in it. Some questions we will consider:
* Why affect now?
* How has affect studies shaped literary studies over the past fifteen years?
* How do cognitive and neuroscientific histories of emotion change our understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
literature and culture?
* Where does affect studies go from here?
We will begin in the morning session by discussing several articles that provide surveys or seminal articulations of affect studies, and the afternoon session will be dedicated to a discussion of essays by two Alabama Symposium members:
Schedule:
10-10:30am: Welcome and Breakfast (provided by the UAH Humanities Center)
10:30am-12pm: Roundtable Discussion of Massumi, Favret, and Leys
12-1pm: Lunch (provided by the UAH Humanities Center)
1-3pm: Symposium Lectures and Q&A
Seth Reno (Romanticism, Auburn University at Montgomery), “Intellectual Love and the Affective Turn”
Danny Siegel (Victorian Era, University of Alabama at Birmingham), "Thought on Display in the Land of Feeling:
Griffith and Dickens"
3-3:30pm: Closing Reception
The Third Annual Meeting of the Alabama Symposium on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies
In 2000, Patricia Clough coined the phrase "the affective turn” to refer to a proliferation of scholarly accounts of biological, non-intentional aspects of feeling and human experience. Since then, the interdisciplinary field of affect studies has emerged as an influential subfield in literary studies, particularly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. Situated at the intersection of critical theory, neuroscience, literature, history, and cognitive psychology, affect studies has renewed emphasis on the emotions, which experienced relative marginalization in scholarship in the late twentieth century. The centerpiece of the third annual meeting of the Alabama Symposium on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Studies is an effort to ask where we are now in affect studies. The meeting is intended both for newcomers to this rich field and for scholars with longstanding investments in it. Some questions we will consider:
* Why affect now?
* How has affect studies shaped literary studies over the past fifteen years?
* How do cognitive and neuroscientific histories of emotion change our understanding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
literature and culture?
* Where does affect studies go from here?
We will begin in the morning session by discussing several articles that provide surveys or seminal articulations of affect studies, and the afternoon session will be dedicated to a discussion of essays by two Alabama Symposium members:
Schedule:
10-10:30am: Welcome and Breakfast (provided by the UAH Humanities Center)
10:30am-12pm: Roundtable Discussion of Massumi, Favret, and Leys
12-1pm: Lunch (provided by the UAH Humanities Center)
1-3pm: Symposium Lectures and Q&A
Seth Reno (Romanticism, Auburn University at Montgomery), “Intellectual Love and the Affective Turn”
Danny Siegel (Victorian Era, University of Alabama at Birmingham), "Thought on Display in the Land of Feeling:
Griffith and Dickens"
3-3:30pm: Closing Reception