Criticism in the middle: readerly affect and experimental form

Thesis

This thesis practises a genre of close reading which is compatible with, and even absorbed by, a text’s affective potentiality. Confronting four late twentieth-century writers whose novels problematise uncomplicated affective legibility, it renews attention to the role of experimental formal devices in cultivating readerly affect, extending and clarifying recent work at the intersection of affect studies and formalist criticism.

Novels by Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter emerge, through this affective formalist approach, as manufacturers of middle affect. Middle affects are neither attractive nor repulsive; they resist extremes; they are mild, undecided, hovering between. The four chapters identify four different middle readerly affects: Spark induces indifference, Johnson weariness, Burgess disgruntlement, and Carter hesitance. These four affects construct a canon of middle feelings which are provocatively acknowledged by the thesis, instead of being overlooked as non-instrumental, non-committal, or unglamorous.

The introduction situates affective formalism within a narrative of formalism’s fluctuating reputation, and articulates a dissatisfaction with contemporary approaches which dictate form as a reflection of historical context. It calls for a reassertion of form’s agency and activity, through attention to the affective affordance of experimental formal devices. The introduction converses, too, with twenty-first-century projects which re-theorise reading, and describes a flimsy reliance on metaphors; it proposes the thesis’s affective formalism as a practical enactment of the modest critical mood which these theorists promote. Each chapter focuses on a single formal device or phenomenon, whether Spark’s verb tenses, Johnson’s typography, Burgess’s phonographic forms, or Carter’s dissonant formal combinations. The thesis’s conclusion gestures towards the stakes of uncovering these middle affects for discussions about the value of reading fiction more broadly.

Authors: Pearson, I

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-xqdody8ae
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: affect; experimental writing; twentieth-century writing; novels; form
• Subjects: Literary form; Literature