Feeling and Theory

This course addresses the crisis in feeling-in
emotion and affect-in the wake of the so-called
"death of theory" and "end of the subject." What
remains for writers of a critical perspective on
the emotions they deploy, portray, and animate in
their work? Does feeling vanish with the
disappearance of the subject? Has the subject in
fact disappeared? Beginning with the "birth" of
the modern or modernist subject in
psychoanalysis, we will examine through a wide
variety of readings the persistence of affect
from a number of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and
post-theoretical perspectives and, in this light,
workshop excerpts from student writing. Students
will be responsible for at least one workshopping
of their own work and approximately three
presentations of readings.