Vertiefungsseminar Mortality and Literature

-By Emotion (affectus) I understand the modifications of the body by which the power of action in the body is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time the ideas of these modifications.” (Baruch Spinoza: Ethics) In everyday language, -affect” is often used synonymously with -emotion”. Affect theory, however, views affect and emotion as two different axes of feelings: emotion represents the personal quality or content of a feeling (e.g., happiness), whereas affect denotes its quantity (its intensity and the types of changes it effects in our bodies). By changing our posture, hormonal composition, body image, etc., it modifies our possible range of action but also the possibilities of becoming a target of someone else’s actions - it is almost trivially intuitive that happiness opens up different paths of action to us and to other subjects than do fear or anger. This is what Spinoza means when he terms -affect” that which increases or diminishes the body’s power of acting, which Brian Massumi rephrases as our -capacities for acting and being acted upon”. Commonplace though it may sound, affect is that which affects us. What is more, by choosing one path of action over another, we make a difference in the world; we, on our part, modify other people’s capacities of acting and being acted upon. This means that, unlike emotion, affect always has an ethical component since it deals with our choice of action and how it affects others, as well as the choice of action of others and their effect on us. In this class, we will look at the poetic methods which literary texts use in order to mediate the workings of affect in the characters of selected 20th century novels, and how they manage to affect us, the readers. This will lead to a better understanding of how ethics can be transported through literature and how literature itself may become an object of ethical reflection. Ultimately, this provides us with a new approach to the question why literature continues to fascinate even in an age of film, video and internet. Since this class will be based on reading philosophical texts, students should be interested in philosophical questions and how to apply them to literary texts. Literature (preferred edition in parentheses): Virginia Woolf: The Waves (Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN 978-0-141-18271-1) Margaret Atwood: Surfacing (Virago, ISBN 978-0-86068-064-2) Samuel Beckett: The Unnamable (Faber and Faber, ISBN 978-0-571-24464-5) Suggested preparatory reading: Mieke Bal: -Einleitung: Affekt als kulturelle Kraft”. In: Antje Krause-Wahl/Heike Oehlschlägel/Serjoscha Wiemer (eds.): Affekte. Analysen ästhetisch-medialer Prozesse. Bielefeld: Transcript 2006, pp. 7-19. Anglistik u. Amerikanistik (BA, PO 2013) Erg.fach Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2017 Weißbach Lisa