Panel #1
Rhythms, Bodies & Materiality
As part of our week-long Following the Affective Turn Symposia, we are delighted to present our virtual panels for you to engage with and watch at your convenience. Please join us for a live virtual panel q&a and discussion on Wednesday 15th September on zoom along with our virtual keynote address from Marie-Luise Angerer (Universität Potsdam) - register here to to receive the zoom link (it's free and open to all!).
'Affect and aging in Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn'
Mary Dawson (University of Leeds)
Mary Dawson is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Leeds. Mary holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Liverpool, an MSc in International Development from London, South Bank University and an MA in English Literature from the University of Leeds. Mary’s PhD research focuses on mid-century British fiction, critical posthumanism, disability studies, and affect theory. Mary’s PhD is fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council White Rose consortium.
'The Face of An/Other?: Affect and Identity in Kobo Abe’s “The Face of Another”'
Sonakshi Srivastava (Indraprastha University, Dehli)
Sonakshi Srivastava graduated from the University of Delhi, in 2020, and is an MPhil candidate at Indraprastha University, Delhi, where she researches on the Anthropocene, Speculative Fictions, and History of Emotions. She was also an Oceanvale Scholar for the Spring-Autumn session at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi, where she researched on the representation of emotions in Kobo Abe’s works.
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She is also the recipient of the Tempus Public Foundation scholarship. Her other areas of interests include aesthetics and critical theory, memory and trauma studies, bioethics, food studies, and Indian Writing in English among others.
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Panel Q&A
Skip to 11:05 minutes in for the panel discussion.
We hope you enjoyed these papers .
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Click here to view Panel #2 - Affective Spaces Part 1: Structures & Practices
Click here to view Panel #3 - Affective Connections Part 1: Relationally & Movement
Abstracts
'Affect and aging in Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn'
Mary Dawson
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This paper explores the idea of aging as a form of affective embodiment through a reading of Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn (1977). In contemporary society aged bodies are often unsettling reminders of a future understood in terms of loss and decline. Aged bodies are also an uncanny reminder of the porosity and mutability of the self (DeFalco, 2010). In this way, age comes to stand for more than material deterioration or the accumulation of memory. Age and aging are also interpersonal affects circulating across and between bodies. Yet, discussions of aging bodies are largely missing from the study of affect and embodiment. This paper draws on Gilles Deleuze’s theorisation of the ‘real’ as a composite of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ experiences, where the ‘virtual’ is the space of affect in the sense of potential unrealised in actual bodies. Through close textual analysis it shows how Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn explores the intersection between affect and embodiment in the context of aging. Pym published Quartet in Autumn on the cusp of changes to the welfare state, changes which connect to a broader shift in attitudes towards aging populations during the twentieth century. The text, which centres on four colleagues approaching retirement, describes the way in which fear and antipathy towards age circulate and attach to aged bodies, distancing these bodies from society in general. Yet, as Pym’s novel shows, this marginal position is also a space of unrealised potential, a virtuality that is always open. Theorising aging as a form of affect transfigures problematic conceptions of age as loss into age as embodied relationality, suggesting a novel way of thinking through intersections between affect and embodiment.
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'The Face of An/Other?: Affect and Identity in Kobo Abe’s “The Face of Another”'
Sonakshi Srivastava
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Nussbaum in her work, “Hiding from Humanity” provides a brief understanding of how the emotions of shame and disgust “concern the borders of the body” (87), and arbitrarily require uniformity. As Rosenkranz writes, “in the concept of the human, there is no ugliness. This concept, as the concept of reason and freedom demands its realization in exterior appearance through the regularity of form”, therefore the irregularity/ non uniformity can be said to contribute to ugliness.
Taking cue from Nussbaum, a more trained lens at shame leads one to reflect on Morgan’s ruminations. He writes that “one dimension of shame can be associated with the way others might look at us, and in this way, the judgement upon us comes from the outside” (19). This is interpretative of a certain set of ideals that must be adhered to by us by virtue of being humans. Shame, then becomes a reactionary emotion to “having failed to meet a standard or rule” (38).
Kobo Abe’s surrealist novel, “The Face of Another” at the intersection of affect and identity, reveals the canker eating away at the soul (?), “the fundamental emptiness of content” of the modern man.
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The story revolves around a chemist who, (in a certain Frankensteinian strain) disfigures his face in an experiment. Ashamed, he tries to reintegrate into the society as well as win the affections of his wife through the aid of a prosthetic mask provided by his doctor. The employment of the mask, however, allows him to delve deep into what appears to be at the surface. He records his stories in a series of notebooks, and as readers/ voyeurs we gain access into his process of thoughts.
The man with the bandaged face is aware of his predicament, and mentions the “fine show” that people put up in order to interact with him by “not looking square in the face but by being affable” (Abe, 10). The false show of “affability” furthers the schism between the protagonist and the society.
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The aim of my paper is to further explore how the ideas of shame and disgust shape identities, and its everyday negotiations. By placing Abe’s text in conversation with Rosenkranz, and Agamben, I will also attempt to delineate the politics of such emotions in the de/construction of “difference”.
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