Body Language: Toward an Affective Formalism of Ulysses

Abstract

Literary affect is commonly theorized as embodied experience that resists conventional emotional categorization. This differential formulation makes it difficult for close reading alone to distinguish textual effects from readerly sensibility and to locate affect in specific literary constructions. Algorithmic criticism, however, allows Cavender’s team to formalize the relations between embodied sensation, emotional categories and affective intensity without simply reproducing and reinforcing the expectations of the reader. Their algorithm, Affectcrawler, creates a map of affective intensities within Ulysses, already an important text for theorists of affect, which can then be subject to human interpretive scrutiny. Reading Ulysses in this way lays the groundwork for an ongoing effort to historicize the distribution and density of affective intensity in the novel as it transitions from modern realism to post-realist modernism.