This thesis examines the performance of affect in relation to gender identity across some of the major works of Willa Cather’s and John Steinbeck’s careers. Throughout this discussion, I contend that Steinbeck—an author not often thought of as projecting feminist concerns—indeed approximates the feminist themes of Cather in his creation of characters who embody nonnormative castes of gender identity, even if Cather does perhaps exceed Steinbeck’s feminist vision in her optimism for the potential of people of nonnormative gender identity to find peace, happiness, and acceptance in an often xenophobic early-twentieth-century America. Over the course of this thesis, I build on the work of affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Anu Koivunen by demonstrating the power of affect theory as a tool for understanding gender politics and gender identity.

This thesis approaches hopelessness through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, situating their thought in relation to Baruch Spinoza and Brian Massumi. Drawing on Massumi’s theorizing of fear, and Spinoza’s theorizing the link between hope and fear, I argue that hope keeps bodies and politics bound to a future that comes to organize the present. From this perspective, I argue that hopelessness can become an important element of not only undoing the ways that future forces come to organize the present, but can open immanent ways of participating in the organization of emergent forces. The thesis also clarifies the differences between affect and emotion, and the body and the subject. This supports an understanding of politics as the undoing and warding off of hope through attending to hopelessness, and an increase in bodies’ capacities to experiment and participate in the organization of their own desires and situations. / Graduate

This thesis maps out the phenomenological and ontological contours of ‘hope’ in an attempt to challenge traditional individualistic, psychologized, and normative accounts, and to reconceptualise hope as a practice of control. Spinoza and Deleuze’s theory of affect is used to develop an understanding of the ‘hoping body’ as the effect of a symbiotic encounter with a conglomerate of forces. The spatio-temporal dynamics and relations of power at work in this larger conglomerate are also explored through Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory. Ultimately, this thesis argues that hope inaugurates complex practices of mobility control by operating as a claim about the necessity of a particular pathway and vehicle in the present that is grounded on the possibility of a desirable destination in the future. / Graduate

This dissertation seeks to articulate how early modern texts formalize their affective qualities in instances of ambiguity. Positioned within the recent turn away from humoral theories of the passions and toward the rhetorical underpinnings of affect in early modern criticism, my project offers an interpretive strategy that privileges the perspective of the text by attending to the vulnerabilities of first-person perspectives in ambiguous rhetorical structures and figures. I argue that these forms signal more than sites of critical debate encoded in the text, as Shoshanna Feldman has suggested; they also privilege textual perspective and reveal affect to be a feature of form. I argue that textual ambivalence may be approached through the logic of catachresis in order to examine how these instances may be read in ways that maintain the strangeness of their didactic and disruptive capability. Reorienting how one approaches ambiguity, I suggest, exposes the potential of often ignored textual elements and suggests that early modern literature models an interpretive agenda dependent upon vulnerable perspectives. Reconceiving the interpretive strategies solicited by each text, I argue that early modern literature embraces the benefits of individual and collective vulnerability. I examine how Marlowe’s Edward II disrupts the binary structure of the king’s two bodies in order to turn an accusation of weakness against authority itself. I turn to Donne’s poetry and prose to argue that it models a hospitable interpretive method that uses form to manage ambiguity from the perspectives of his textual voices while orienting readers to welcome the strangeness of his contradictions. I then pursue an analysis of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I that reorients Falstaff’s function in the play as its unlikely focal perspective, a position that stages a resistance to the play’s power structures. Finally, I briefly consider how my analysis bears on familial and rhetorical conventions in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Attending to the formal practices that construct literary affect, this project reconsiders the ways in which early modern English literature navigates the intersections of vulnerability that articulate a text’s orientation to the cultural networks in which it was produced.

Disruption is something that we must negotiate as part of our everyday lives. The context of disruption can vary in nature from being positive to being negative in nature. However, the emotional effects of the disruption have not been investigated in the social psychological literature. This study utilizes structuralized ritualization affect theory of social exchange, attribution theory, and the theory of relational cohesion in order to investigate the effects of disruption on the overall positive emotion of the actors involved and their feelings of cohesiveness with regard to their group.

Disruption is something that we must negotiate as part of our everyday lives. The context of disruption can vary in nature from being positive to being negative in nature. However, the emotional effects of the disruption have not been investigated in the social psychological literature. This study utilizes structuralized ritualization affect theory of social exchange, attribution theory, and the theory of relational cohesion in order to investigate the effects of disruption on the overall positive emotion of the actors involved and their feelings of cohesiveness with regard to their group.

This thesis examines theoretical paradigms within men and masculinities studies (MMS), introducing a new materialist lens through the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Brian Massumi. Two affective dimensions of MMS are explored through the application of this new materialist lens: the affect of wonder and flat affect. These two concepts can be understood as expressions of Spinoza’s two types of affects; joyful affects, or those affects that increase a body’s capacity for movement, and sad affects, or those affects that decrease a body’s capacity for movement. The affect of wonder, a joyful affect, is theorized in conversation with antiviolence and therapeutic masculinity initiatives. Flat affect, a sad affect, is theorized in conversation with Canadian men’s suicide rates. This thesis argues that dominant forms of masculinity orient subjects away from wonder and towards an unlivable state characterized by flat affect. Men and masculinities studies theory lacks applied engagement with affect, and this thesis contributes to efforts to address this lack. / Graduate

How do we understand our encounter with ambivalent or visceral aesthetic feelings—textual environments, moods, and atmospheres—if they do not solely belong to the representation of individual or collective emotions? This dissertation proposes a concept of “the feeling of form” to approach these aesthetic feelings as formal dynamics, such as restless orientations and rhythmic intensities. How can literary forms have feelings, and where—or is it necessary—to locate the textual body and the subject of these feelings? The goal of my dissertation is not to show what specific neurological procedures are involved in the emotive-cognitive entanglement between the text and the reader, but to understand “form” as a verb—forming, shaping, mediating, transmitting—whose dynamics and actions manifest the narrative form’s visceral aesthetic feelings, and to examine how such feelings bear significant cultural and political currency. Reading formal dynamics as aesthetic feelings also invites us to adjust our usual gaze at “form” away from categories coined by various formalisms, such as “genre,” “structure,” “focalization,” or “style.” In doing so, we are able to reimagine these categories as part of the dynamics of formal reorientations, rhythms, and syntactic intensities, and to open ourselves up to the impersonal agency and criticality of literary forms. Based on these convictions, my dissertation argues that reading for the feeling of form allows us to experience how literary forms transmit and regenerate volatile experiences of history in ways that complicate, supplement, or subvert the explicit representation of historical events and temporality in a literary text. In this dissertation, I focus on the relationship between the feeling of form and the experience of various histories in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–1928), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–1934), Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s single-volume novel The Unconsoled (1995). Chapter One traces how nauseous form in Parade’s End allows us to experience wartime and postwar anxiety through Christopher Tietjens’s self-revolting and incoherent consciousness. Chapter Two examines how the deterioration of rhythm in A Scot’s Quair transmits a historical experience of gradual suffocation intricately linked with Scotland’s political and ecological disasters. In a brief Coda, I conclude my project by looking at how The Alexandria Quartet and The Unconsoled manifest weakened and depleted feelings of form, and how these feelings prompt us to rethink the relationship of the feeling of form to European heteronormative ideology and the ethics of community formation. The Unconsoled (1995), in particular, serves as a twofold limit case of the feeling of form: first, as a limit case of the futile feeling of form, and second, as a limit case of the distinction between the novel form and the novel series form. This twofold limit case speaks to its own historical experience of futility at the end of history, and responds to the aesthetic and ideological legacies of early twentieth-century experimental novel series. / Graduate / 2021-05-12

Thesis advisor: Marjorie E. Howes / This work applies current theories of affect to inform an understanding of the role of shame in the process of narration. It begins with a dual-sided hypothesis: experiences of humiliation and its consequence, shame, can initiate and mediate a narrative act, and the narrative process can immediately or over time mitigate and even eliminate the negative feelings of shame. The project particularly draws upon the pioneering affect theories of Silvan S. Tomkins to focus upon the life and written works of Willa Cather. It discovers and traces a poetics of shame as it occurs throughout the narratives she produced over a lifetime. It highlights how the Cathers’ forced migration from Virginia to Nebraska resulted in a loss of class and status as well as alterations in family dynamics. These disruptions created the foundations for her perceived humiliations and the shame that motivated her use of recurrent scenes, characters, narrative resolutions and even the very language she chose. This study emphasizes the usefulness of the application of affect studies for literary criticism and cultural studies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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