Abstract
This chapter argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy is of central importance to affect theory, particularly in the field of literary criticism. Marsden explores the idea that literary texts generate new and strange affective forces but that these are frequently commuted to normative models of human experience when analyzed by literary critics. Inflecting Brian Massumi’s influential work on affect theory with a Nietzschean critique of value, Marsden offers a reading of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, which remains alert to the power of affective becoming to communicate “senses without names.”
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Notes
- 1.
In an influential article critical of recent theorizations of affect, Ruth Leys (2011) takes the argument to be that “affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is prior to intentions, meanings, reasons and beliefs—because they are nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning” (437).
- 2.
In his notes for The Will to Power project, Nietzsche proposes “that the will to power is the primitive form of affect” and “all other affects are only developments of it” (sec. 688). This might be usefully thought in conjunction with Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg’s remarks (2010) that “affect is in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter” and that affect “marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters” (Introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, 2).
- 3.
This is a point that Cheryl Lester (1988) makes about the various sections of The Sound and the Fury (145). I gratefully borrow her formulation here in extending the point to McCullers’ text.
- 4.
See Oswald (2016).
- 5.
See Marsden (2017).
- 6.
See Iser (1974), 139.
- 7.
See Volpe (1964), 359.
References
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McCullers, Carson. 1962. The Member of the Wedding. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First published 1946.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968 [1901]. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.
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Marsden, J. (2019). Senses Without Names: Affective Becomings in William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_10
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