Browsing by Subject "Affect theory"
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Item The animal at the scene of writing : narrative subjectivities of the Lebanese civil war(2010-08) Miller, Alyssa Marie; El-Ariss, Tarek; Ali, Kamran A.This thesis inquires into anti-humanist trends in Lebanese literature of the civil war and post-war period by examining the limit concept of the animal in three novelistic works: Beirut Nightmares [Kawābīs Bayrūt] (1976) by Ghādah Sammān, Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury, and The Tiller of Waters [Ḥārith al-miyāh] (1998) by Hudá Barakāt. Marking a departure in previous critical work done on this body of literature, which has been dominated by trauma theory as an analytical framework, this thesis employs an innovative synthesis of narrative theory and affect theory to describe how the authors utilize narrative to humanize the war experience, thereby mitigating the effects of contingency and fragmentation on the narrative subject. After the collapse of the state, the human being is separated from its political form, leaving it perilously exposed to acts of violence. It may also, however, carry out aggressions on its fellow man with impunity. Both of these terrible aspects of man’s nature in wartime are understood conventionally as exposing a beast within man, since they radically undermine the precepts of moral value and self-sovereignty that constitute the pillars of humanism. Through acts of “composition” the first person narrators of these novels strive to insulate their affective core from participating in ambient currents of violence, which are viewed as a kind of contamination understood as “becoming-animal.” While implicating the subject in a participation that is other-than-human, these animal becomings are also, following Deleuze and Guttari, ways of attaining a new vitality and escaping the hierarchical symbolic power of logos. Use of this animal figure allows the authors to rethink the human in ways that does not assume a fixed humanist ontology. For Sammān, the animal represents a principle of vitality that allows her protagonist to overcome human sources of inertia, such as melancholic memories or ingrained habit, thereby preserving the authentic voice of the writerly self. For Khoury and Barakāt, the animal permits them to foreground the figure of the subaltern who stands in a minoritarian relation to logos. They also propose a post-humanist ethos of co-presence based on the affective subject’s receptivity and vulnerability; its capacity to both affect and be affected.Item 'But you haven't told me about yourself' : women's digests in Pakistan as an affective space of belonging(2013-12) Ahmed, Kiran Nazir; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-This report demonstrates how encounters between readers, writers and editors of a low-brow genre of Urdu fiction, create an affective space of belonging. This genre is published in commercial monthly magazines (commonly known as women’s digests) that contain narratives of feminine domesticity, primarily written by and for women, in Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic work (archival and interviews) with authors, readers and editors of two monthlies, this study traces the contours of digest community as an affective space of belonging that provides a ‘complex of confirmation and consolation’ on how to be a woman in Pakistan’s changing social milieu. It further argues that recent proliferation of cell phones has led to a new sensibility in this community that has its own rhythm of sound. Previously readers would communicate through published letters mediated by editors. However, now there is direct contact between these two groups, through cell phones. Digest narratives are now also being drawn from experiences readers share with authors over cell phone conversations. This sharing is not factual as such, but rather an affective exchange of feelings about facts. Thus, these conversations can be seen as a shared emotional experience where the lack of visual cues regarding social class, age and ethnicity (since readers and writers rarely meet each other) leads to voices becoming just that – voices that share life stories and experiences. There is thus a transient coming together of women who are mostly unrelated by kinship or ethnicity; and a sociality is formed between strangers with its own sensory feel of rhythm and sound, through the medium of the cell phone. This work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on how media and technology is a negotiation between material properties of technologies being introduced and the particular effects in forming new affects and sensibilities; and how dominant representations of Muslim women as a singular and stable category of analysis, can be spoken back to, by highlighting their myriad voices and understanding them beyond the usual tropes of victimhood and emancipation.Item "The maniac bellowed" : queer affect and queer temporality in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre(2015-05) Davis, Carolyn Marjorie; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Moore, Lisa LCharlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre, is commonly read as a feminist bildungsroman in which a young woman claims her independence. In opposition to these readings, I instead choose to question the ways in which the novel's feminist potential is elided by its simultaneous imperial project. Using the figure of Bertha Mason, I trace the ways in which Jane Eyre's relationship with Edward Rochester is constructed through Bertha's dehumanization in order to reassert the dominance of the healthy Anglo-European family. I examine Jane Eyre's claims to subjectivity, alongside Bertha's very few textual interventions, through the lens of affect theory to show the way in which Bertha Mason, rather than Jane Eyre's mad double, represents nineteenth-century prejudices about creole bodies and undomesticated women. Finally, I engage with theories of queer temporality to read the novel in a way that makes Bertha Mason's agency legible while also evading the novel's troubled relationship to traditional feminist theory. I ultimately suggest that the climactic destruction of Thornfield Hall represents a repudiation of sympathetic feminine bonds in favor of the patriarchal institutions of marriage and respectability.Item The self as subject and the subjected self: networks of being and becoming in the captivity of Miguel de Cervantes and Antonio de Sosa(2015-05) McCoy, Christina Inés; Reed, Cory A.; Harney, Michael; Robbins, Jill; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Heng, GeraldineIn this dissertation, I draw on theories of affect, performance and social networks to examine cross-cultural contact in three captivity plays by Miguel de Cervantes that take place outside of Spain, La gran sultana, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel, as well as the only extant work by the Portuguese cleric Antonio de Sosa, Topografía e historia general de Argel, an understudied and historically significant account of life in Algiers during the late sixteenth century. Both of these authors, held against their will in Algiers’ slave quarters, emphasize humanity and corporeality despite their dehumanizing experience of captivity. I regard the act of writing as an attempt by these two authors to create new nodes in a human Mediterranean network, one expanded by corsairing and spanning from Algeria to the Spanish playhouses and beyond. In doing so, my dissertation shows how works of this epoch often dismantle binary systems of Christian and Muslim, self and other, dyads upon which modern postcolonial studies rely so heavily. I argue that these authors, and their fictional characters, are intermediaries across categories of identity, in spite of difference. Through my close readings I further refashion early modern Spanish identity within the framework of cosmopolitanism, wherein sites of bondage become not only spaces of conflict but also of confluence.