Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Series Q) - Softcover

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822330156 ISBN 13: 9780822330158

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2003

Synopsis

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

About this title

About the Author

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of numerous books including A Dialogue on Love and Epistemology of the Closet. Her books Tendencies; Fat Art, Thin Art, a book of poetry; Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction; and Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (coedited with Adam Frank) are published by Duke University Press.

From the Back Cover

"Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes with intense precision, and yet her work directs us toward the domain where meaning is music, unquantifiable, enigmatic, nonlinguistic. If the performative speech act, with all its relation to norms and laws, is central to the reception of her work in queer theory, then the performativity of knowledge beyond speech--aesthetic, bodily, affective--is its real topic."--Lauren Berlant, author of "The Queen of America Goes to Washington City"

Reviews

These essays, "a palimpsest of previously published and unpublished material," find Sedgwick expanding her impressive critical powers to areas beyond literature and politics. Though she's best known for her work in queer theory (Epistemology of the Closet), Sedgwick has always been interested in "performativity"-how people embody linguistic and non-linguistic concepts. Sedgwick has hardly abandoned explorations of queerness-an essay on shame and Henry James's The Art of the Novel is about as queer as theory gets-but these five pieces find her attuned to the textures of things, and to things themselves. Her readings-of everything from Thackeray to "my friends who are thirty"-take on a sensual quality, exploring the connections between "phenomenology and affect" and "what motivates performativity and performance" and "what individual and collective effects are mobilized in their execution." Fearless, challenging and occasionally exhilarating, Sedgwick remains one of the most courageous critics around.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822330156
• ISBN 13: 9780822330158
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208