Rules of Affection
An Examination of the Affective Relationship between Scholar and Literary Art
Jitske Brinksma 11775475 MA Thesis
rMA Literary Studies 19858 Words
Supervisor: dr. Gaston Franssen
Second reader: prof. dr. Carrol Clarkson 14 June 2019
With thanks to my supervisor, dr. Gaston Franssen, for helping me find an approach to a topic that was new to me, and for being truly supportive throughout this process.
To the scholars who were willing to discuss their relationship to literature and to reflect on the role of emotion in literary studies. I came away from the interviews feeling inspired and excited to continue my work.
To Caitlin and Anne, for the feedback and support; to Anneloek, for keeping me on my toes and for many pizza nights; to my parents and sisters, who are the best always; to my cat, Moes, despite sitting on my notes and distracting me; and finally, to my grandparents, who brought books to our family.
Table of Contents
Introduction………...4
Chapter One ………10
Affect and Attachment in Literary Studies 1.1 Affect and Emotion..……….11
1.2 Affect and Literature……….15
1.3 Affect and the Scholarly Habitus………..19
1.4 Affect and Literary Scholarship………22
1.5 Fan Culture, Fan Journals and Academic Writing………27
1.6 Academic Writing and Creativity……….31
Chapter Two……….33
Jane Austen and Affect in Academic Writing 2.1 Jane Austen Scholarship and Fan Culture………..34
2.2 Jane Austen Society of North America and Persuasions………...36
2.3 Affective Responses in Persuasions………...38
Chapter Three………46
Charles Dickens and the Academic Fan 3.1 Charles Dickens Scholarship and Fan Culture………47
3.2 The Dickens Fellowship and The Dickensian……….48
3.3 Affect in The Dickensian……….49
Conclusion……….58
Works Cited………....62
Appendix………68
Interview Respondent A……….69
Interview Respondent B……….77
Introduction
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 100
I started reading Jane Austen’s work around the age of fourteen. It was some of the first ‘grown-up’ literature I read, and I fell completely in love with it. I thought her novels were funny and romantic, and gave me a sense of nostalgia for a past I had not lived myself. My love for Jane Austen guided my introduction to English literature, which finally led to me deciding to study English, and later literary studies, and to me writing my BA thesis on (among others) Jane Austen. When the moment came to decide what to research to conduct for my MA thesis, people around me advised me to find a subject I loved, seeing as I would be spending around six months working on it, and my mind kept coming back to that first love, Jane Austen.
This search for a topic that I felt passionate about made me look back on my past work and I recognised that in my academic work I have often been driven by love for - and attachment to - literary works, but also that this affective relationship between me and my object of study is not something I discuss freely in academic context, either in written work, but also rarely in the classes I have taken. There seems to be a contrast or opposition between my behaviour as a scholar, where the goal is to be objective, and more subjective expressions of my relationship to literature that can find a place in, for example, a fan community. As a student, I have always been taught to value objectivity, empiricism, and to attempt to depersonalise my writing. On several occasions I have talked to teachers who discouraged students from writing about works that they love too much, because it would affect a
student’s ability to remain critical and objective. The personal relationship I felt to my objects of study did, in my experience of academia, not have a place.
However, simply not writing about or discussing an emotional response to a literary work does not mean that it does not happen, or that it does not have an effect. This made me wonder what the affective relationship between me, as a researcher, and my object of study meant for my research. To what extent does it influence my opinion of a novel? How does it affect the way I study and write about a novel? Are the ideas that I present as objectively as possible in my research influenced or coloured by my subjective experience, and to what extent does this does this influence the quality of my research? How do other researchers deal with their emotional relationship or attachment to literature? And if we were to include emotional responses in academic work, what does or would that look like?
The interest in emotion or affect is certainly not entirely new within this field: over the past few decades, affect and emotion have become a major theme within the humanities. Within literary studies, an affective relationship between readers and literature is recognized quite broadly, with scholarship focusing on fan communities and responses to literature. Examples are scholars such as Deirdre Lynch, who has become influential in the field of English cultural and literary studies with her focus on the history of the novel and her focus on affect, Rita Felski, whose theories on postmodernity and the future of cultural and literary studies are were among the first to turn the focus to the importance of affect and emotion, and Susan Feagin, who has published work on the role of emotion in the appreciation and
experience of art. Felksi, for example, speaks of “forms of attachments,” between reader and work (739) and Feagin explains that an emotional and affective response to a work of
literature is an important part of appreciating it (1). Lynch examines the attachment that fans of Jane Austen develop to both her works and the authorial figure. Felski even goes so far as to explain that the consideration of affect within the study of works of art is crucial because one of the “distinguishing marks of works of art […] is their ability to inspire intense responses, inchoate emotions, quasi-visceral passions, working and worming their way into
our minds and bodies,” and continues by stating that “art is the quintessential mood-altering substance" (Felski “After Suspicion” 31). Working with the idea that a personal, subjective perspective can alter the way a person reads, Kathryn Sutherland shows that a reader’s personal experience makes a difference in their interpretation of Jane Austen’s literary work. She finds, for example, that, during the Second World War, Jane Austen was being read as representing “specific qualities denoting cultural or national survival” (Sutherland 16-8), something that in more recent research, has faded almost entirely to the background.
These examples suggest that circumstances of the reader can influence their
interpretation of a particular work. Therefore there may be a reason to look into the personal connection that literary scholars have to literary works. However, where this relationship between readers and literature is acknowledged, the relationship between literary scholar and their objects of study is rarely acknowledged within literary scholarship.
This leads to the question of why there is this lack of space for the acknowledgment of affect within literary scholarship. Academic discourse generally adheres to a relatively strict form, and this form has an importance influence both on what can be expressed, but to a certain extent also on what can be experienced. Talking about form and content in literary works, Martha Nussbaum explains why it can be important to consider form, stating that “style itself makes claims, and form is not separable from philosophical content, but is part of content.” (3)
More explicitly, Caroline Levine considers form to be a pattern of socio-political experience, and explains that form is a matter of “imposing and enforcing boundaries . . . and hierarchies on experience,” (3) and additionally, that it “[shapes] what is possible to think, say, and do in a given context” (5). This relates closely to academic writing: if there is no form in which in which affective responses have a place, this can have an influence on what experiences are valued, and even on what and how literary works are experienced.
This then leads to the question of what academic form currently looks like. The form of academic scholarship will, of course, vary throughout different disciplines. However, there is a strong influence of the natural and social sciences on the humanities. Anna Duszak writes about academic cultures and styles and explains that academic form travels across disciplines. She explains that all academic disciplines are asked to work in a similar form, even if there can be some degree of variety between different disciplines. She explains that “for the sake of scientific purity and veracity, a plain and impersonal language [is] recommended – a
language devoid of emotional language and interpersonal meanings, of fuzzy expressions and of intellectual . . . bias. All this [contributes] to the image of a dehumanized writer/reader” (3). As Duszak explains, academic discourse values objectivity, depersonalisation, and empiricism, but to what extent can academic scholars be objective, and what value might there be in a more subjective, personal approach?
An important element of this discussion on the role of affect and emotion within literary studies is the question of why it is relevant or important if researchers have an emotional response to their object of study. Sarah Ahmed explains that “emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies,” (1) meaning that our emotions shape our experience of the world. Some theorists have described emotions as being judgments (Ahmed 5), while other point out emotions may only involve judgments. For example, if we take the emotion of anger, being angry about something would imply a judgment that something is bad, even if this may objectively not be the case. There are also theorists that suggest that emotions involve sensations or bodily feeling as well as forms of cognition (ibid.). If emotions do shape our experience, we cannot discount them in academic scholarship.
Bringing this together, it seems that academic discourse generally does not create a space for the expression of emotion and affect, even if emotion and affect may have a
significant effect on the researcher. This research project strives to answer the question: How does an affective relationship between scholar and literary object of study manifest in literary scholarship? The aim of this research project is to understand the affective power of literary art on academic readers, and to understand the relationship between an objective attitude, the act of writing critique, and the affective response to literary art. Additionally, this project attempts to show how affect can be expressed, and has been expressed by scholars. In order to do this, two case studies are explored. Both case studies focus on affective responses in author-focussed journals, one in an academic context, and the other in a non-academic context. There are several journals, both within and outside of academia, that are focused primarily on the work of one specific author, and my hypothesis is that these academic journals bridge a gap between academia and fan behaviour, and may therefore offer some space for the expression of affect. More specifically, there is a focus on two canonical, English authors, namely Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. Both authors enjoy a steady and dedicated fan-base, are well established within literary studies, and attract attention from both academic as well as non-academic readers. These journals are used to study the textual representation of affect. As this textual representation cannot cover the full experience of an affective relationship between scholar and literary work, three literary scholars were
interviewed about their affective relationship to literary works and how they represent this in their research. An analysis of these interviews is used in order to see how they reflect on the presence of affect and emotion in literary scholarship.
The first chapter of the thesis explores the relationship between literature, affect, and academia from a theoretical standpoint. In this chapter I examine affect and affect theory, and the relationship between literature and affect. The focus of the chapter is on the role of affect in scholarship, specifically within literary studies. The theoretical chapter also examines the reflections of the three literary scholars who participated in the interviews. The second
chapter focuses on love in academic writing. In order to study this, Jane Austen scholarship is used as a case study. This chapter considers Jane Austen scholarship and Jane Austen
fandom, and the main focus is on an author-focused academic journal, Persuasions. This chapter examines the 2016 edition of Persuasions, a journal on Jane Austen, published by the Jane Austen Society of North America. By close reading the articles published in this edition, the different kinds of expression of affect will be analysed. The third chapter focuses on affective expressions by academics in a non-academic setting. To do so, I focus on a Charles Dickens fan community that is, partly made up out of academics. In this chapter, the non-academic journal The Dickensian is analysed. The Dickensian is a fan journal in which academic researchers frequently publish. This chapter considers the participation of
academics in the more general fan-community and fan activities. I examine the way in which academics express their affective relationship with Charles Dickens and his works in a non-academic setting, and how this differs from the types of expression in an non-academic journal.
Chapter 1
Affect and Attachment in Literary Studies
“Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman”
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 271.
In recent years, there has been a move to change the tone of critique within the humanities, and more specifically within literary studies. Bruno Latour, for example, calls for a move away from deconstruction by developing a focus on matters of concern rather than matters of fact in order to move towards a critical space in which the goal is to protect and care for subjects that we find important, rather than to debunk and deconstruct. Similarly, scholars such as Rita Felski and Sarah Ahmed are calling the productiveness of the hermeneutics of suspicion into question (Felski “After Suspicion” 28, Ahmed The Cultural Politics of
Emotion). Literary critics are starting to wonder what has been lost through the focus on
deconstructing a text, and whether the rise of theory has overshadowed the question of why we are drawn to texts in the first place (Felski Uses of Literature 1). Clare Hemmings
explains that fields such as literary studies are perceived to be at an impasse in terms of their critical potential and a growing movement of scholars is wondering, firstly, why there is this perception, and secondly, how to counteract this (549). What follows this disillusioned attitude towards deconstruction and suspicion is a broader move within the humanities and literary studies towards a focus on emotion and affect in, what is called, the affective turn. The affective turn has shifted the attention to the “preconscious workings of the affective forces” (Ioanes 57) and the politics of emotion (Ioanes, Ahmed). Since turn to affect, the realisation has come that “affect shapes human life” (Ioanes 57), but that studying the way affect shapes human life is complicated because it cannot be “accounted for in an exclusive focus on rational thought or linguistic structure”; it is a term for apprehending those “visceral
forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing.” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010)” (Ioanes 57). As Anna Ioanes explains, the turn toward affect is a turn “toward embodiment and emotion” (ibid.).
Literary studies is one of the fields where the affective turn has become increasingly important in recent years. Literature and emotion are often considered to be closely
connected: Susan Faegin states that having an emotional and/or affective response to a fictional work is a crucial part of appreciating literature and Patrick Colm Hogan explains that literature is “animated by emotion” (3). However, as I will show in this chapter, there appears to be a gap in this consideration of the role of affect in literature. The literary researcher is generally not considered as a reader whose affective responses may influence their perception of a work. In this chapter, I will firstly examine what affect is, how it has been conceptualised, and why the affective turn has become more influential in recent years. I will then consider the relationship between literature and affect, and I will then finally come to the role of affect in the scholarly habitus, and more specifically in literary scholarship. Additionally, In order to understand how literary scholars reflect on the influence of affect in literary studies, I have conducted interviews with three literary scholars.
Affect and Emotion
To start, affect has been conceptualised in different ways across different fields. As I stated previously, the interest in affect has been increasing especially in the last decade across a number of fields. The original emergence of affect has been attributed to Silvan Tomkins’s work within the field of psychology in the 1960’s (Tellegen and Frankhuisen 68). The affective turn, however, only truly started gaining ground from the 1990’s onward. Within the field of affect studies, it is possible to differentiate between two major branches, namely “affect theory” and “affective science” (Colm Hogan 1). These branches build on two
significantly different frameworks: Affective science is derived from cognitive science and is influenced by social psychology. Affect theory, however, has developed from and in dialogue with cultural studies (ibid.). Within both these branches, the term affect has a different
meaning and connotation. Affective science considers affect to be a term that encompasses something beyond emotion, and “delimit[s] a natural” kind of response. Here, affect is used to denote a category of “mental states that includes emotions, moods, attitudes, interpersonal stances and affect dispositions” (Frijda and Scherer 10). Important to note here is lack of separation and difference between affect and emotion. Emotion falls within the broader concept of affect, and as Colm Hogan explains, in affect science an emotion is considered to be the “activation of some motivation system,” for a relatively short duration (2-3).
Additionally, Nico Frijda explains that an emotion is an “inner state that predicts forthcoming behaviour,” and continues by stating that emotions can be considered to be “tendencies to establish, maintain, or disrupt a relationship with the environment” (71). This relationship between emotion and the outside world is an important aspect of the consideration of affect within scholarship.
This thesis will build more on the conceptualisation of affect from affect theory, where the concept is used and understood differently in affect theory, where the term affect builds on the critical line of thinking from, among others, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Ticineto Clough 2). Affect theory in many ways draws on psychoanalytic thought, and has become more aimed at social critique through Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement in critique of social and political structures (Colm Hogan 6). In psychoanalytic theory, affect is
considered to be “the qualitative expression of the quantity of instinctual energy and of its fluctuations,”(Laplanche and Pontalis 13). In the psychoanalytic tradition, where different drives (such as the sexual and ego drives) structure the human experience, affects are produced “by a combination of the force and direction of instinctual energies – as they bear
on the particular objects – and the counterforces of blockage, redirection, etc., produced by the external world, other instinctual forces, conscience” and other, related factors (Colm Hogan 6).
Writing within this tradition, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg define affect as “an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation
as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities (1). Another affect
theorist, Simon O’Sullivan, explains that affect is often considered to be “extra-discursive and extra-textual,” and states that “affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter. We might even say that affects are immanent to matter. They are certainly immanent to experience.” (O’Sullivan 126) This idea that affect colours our
experience of the world around us, will become important when considering the relationship between affect and critical thinking. This relationship between affect and the outside world is also discussed by Seigworth and Gregg, who discuss that the power of lies in the “ever-gathering accretion of force-relations.” They explain that affect is a potential: “a body’s
capacity to affect and to be affected. How does a body, marked in its duration by these
various encounters with mixed forces, come to shift its affections (its being-affected) into action (capacity to affect)” (Seigworth and Gregg 2). Affect is not something that remains in the body of the affected person, but also has an effect on the outside world. A final important conceptualisation of affect comes from O’Sullivan, who states that affect is “precisely an event or happening” (O’Sullivan 127), by which he points to the temporary nature of affect. This description also references the experience of having the affective response being brought on by something that can be outside of one’s own control: it happens to a person. This focus on affect as event or happening is important in relation to literary studies, because, as will be shown in this thesis, the literary experience can bring on an affective response.
These debates on the differences between affect science and affect theory and the different conceptualisations of affect, emotion, and feeling are inherently complicated by their theoretical limits. As Derek Attridge shows in his book The Work of Literature, there is no consensus on how these terms should and could effectively be separated from each other, and although in some research these terms are considered to be entirely separate concepts,1
in practice, these elements are extremely difficult to separate when analysing written work or when speaking to people and there will often be a great deal of overlap. In this research project, I will be relating more closely to the perspective of affect theory, rather than affect science, and will mainly follow the conceptualisation by O’Sullivan.
These two ways of considering affect are not only split in their theoretical
background, but also in their aims. As Ioanes explains, scholars such as Sarah Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, who work from the affect theory perspective, are more focused on the way cultural “formations encase, manipulate, and circulate emotion,” (58) whereas people like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are more interested in the embodied character of affect and attempt to offer an alternative to an overemphasis on “disembodied rationality and the structuring role of language” (ibid.). Additionally, Ioanes explains the focus on perception within affect theory, and states that “the moment of perception, with the body as its site, is also a moment where the aesthetic and the affective meet and intermingle.” (ibid.) In order for affect to happen, there has to be some kind of perception, and the aesthetic can be a trigger for an affective response. For the current research project, it is mainly important that these perspectives show, on the one hand, the importance of the individual perceiving the world outside of them, and that this can cause an affective response, but secondly, the way these affective responses are understood, considered, and expressed, are influenced by the (cultural) environment.
In conclusion, especially within affect science tradition, a division between affect, feeling, and emotion is recognised. Within the affect theory tradition, with people such as O’Sullivan and Attridge, this division is presented as less strictly defined. Affect can be considered to be a moment of intensity that happens in or on the body, and happens before or outside of the conscious mind. Additionally, affect influences the way people perceive the world.
Affect and Literature
When thinking about the role of affect in the literary experience, it is important to start by considering literature and the question of when a text becomes a literary work of art. Scholars such as Deidre Lynch and Felski have argued that people can and often do develop close affective relationships to literary works, with Felski speaking of "forms of attachments" (“Latour and Literary Studies” 739) to literary works and Lynch discussing the importance of the love for literature in the development of English Studies as an academic field. Felski explains that the consideration of affect within the study of works of art is crucial because “one of the distinguishing marks of works of art […] is their ability to inspire intense responses, inchoate emotions, quasi-visceral passions, working and worming their way into our minds and bodies. Art is the quintessential mood-altering substance" (Felski “After Suspicion” 31). The relationship I am studying in this project is the affective relationship between academic readers and the literary works they study. In this section, however, I want to focus first more generally on the affective relationship that can develop between a reader and a literary text, and how this influences a reader.
What is important here is the idea that literature comes to exist between the work and the reader. In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes, among other things, discusses the relationship between reader and text. He considers a literary text to consist of multiple writings and ideas, and that the place where all this multiplicity comes together is the reader
(rather than what was previously often argued, the author). He states: “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (148). In a similar argument, David Attridge explains that he considers the literary work of art to come into being in the “event of reading,” (25) and states that the power of a literary work, or as he calls it, the “workness” of a text “lies in the effect it produces in a reader.” (28) The literary work that is created in the reading of a text is thus a realization of an experience. This leads to the idea that every literary event is unique to a reader. Attridge states: “That there is no single
adequate reading is, I think, uncontentious; this is due to the fact that every reading deploys a different set of strategies and criteria, and emerges from a different cultural background, and distributes attention to different aspects of the text differently.” (36) Attridge further explains that the literary event is influenced by what he calls the reader’s “ideoculture,” a concept that can be related to Pierre Bourdieu’s term “habitus,” and refers to “linguistic and cultural knowledge, generic expectations, technical know-how,” a “system of dispositions,” and “matrix of preferences” (Attridge 62). An important note here is that it should be considered that there are different modes of reading: not every reading of a novel or poem is a literary reading, and thus not every text becomes a work of art. Attridge examines Roman Ingarden’s distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic reading. Attridge explains that he considers the aesthetic reading to have as its goal “the grasping of the object as a harmonious whole,” (73) meaning that if we want to grasp a novel or poem as an aesthetic object, a work of art, we need to allow for an aesthetic reading to come into being, whereas the non-aesthetic reading is, for example, the reading for a specific goal, such as gaining knowledge on a specific subject. In this non-aesthetic reading, the work is not necessarily read as a
“harmonious whole” (73). Felski explains that the consideration of affect within the study of works of art is crucial because “one of the distinguishing marks of works of art . . . is their
ability to inspire intense responses, inchoate emotions, quasi-visceral passions, working and worming their way into our minds and bodies. Art is the quintessential mood-altering substance." (Felski “After Suspicion” 31)
Secondly, one of the main functions of literature, beyond its content, its ability to offer social critique, or to educate, is to offer an aesthetic experience. Ioanes explains that both the aesthetic and affect are rooted in bodily sensation (59). In his paper, “The Aesthetics of Affect,” O’Sullivan explains that critique often moves beyond that “which defines art,” namely the aesthetic (125), and that the discourse of aesthetics was reconfigured into a discourse of and on representation (126). O’Sullivan argues that where critique often focuses on other aspects of art, art is “precisely antithetical to knowledge” and produces affect (125-6). O’Sullivan goes so far as to say that art in essence is a bundle of affects, or, following Deleuze and Guattari “a bloc of sensations, waiting to be reactivated by a spectator or participant” (126). This is related to the relationship between art and experience: I want to consider the relationship between perception and literature as an experience. Attridge states that “literature as art involves a particular kind of experience that, although taking a host of different forms, can be characterized as an opening to others” (Attridge 16). Similarly, Ioanes states: “art works – that cultural texts produce effects in the world, even if those effects seem to take place on a micro level, in the bodies of their audience.” (57) O’Sullivan explains that it was the discourse of deconstruction that led to a way of thinking about art that inherently disallowed the possibility of accessing the event of the work of art.
Although the previous examples have shown that there is perception and affect play an important role in the experience of literature, , Saskia Tellegen and Jolanda Frankhuisen note that little to no research has been conducted into the different emotions that can occur when reading a book. They explain that this is particularly strange because in jury reports or reviews of literary works, the emotional impact of a work is often taken into account (68). In
their book Waarom is lezen plezierig?, they investigate the emotional impact of reading, and also attempt to understand why there has been this lack of research into this topic. They explain that part of the problem could be that an emotional response to literature is often considered to be a childish way of reading, a “stadium in de leesontwikkeling dat men ontgroeid [moet] zijn voor men zich tot de volwassen lezers mocht rekenen” (68). Felski makes a similar argument in Uses of Literature. In the chapter “Enchantment,” Felski
examines a specific type of affective relationship between reader and novel. She characterizes enchantment by a state of “intense involvement” and “a sense of being so entirely caught up in an aesthetic object that nothing else seems to matter.” (54) She explains that “the novel is the genre most frequently accused of casting a spell on its readers” and explains that this was, for most of literary history, considered to be a dangerous thing: there was a fear that literature would lure readers away “from their everyday lives in search of heightened sensations and undiluted pleasures.” (53) A major concern was that readers would no longer be able to “distinguish reality and imagination” and would be “deprived of their reason.” (ibid.) Women especially were considered to be prone to falling under this enchanting power of literature as they were considered to be more “susceptible and suggestible,” lacked intellectual distance and were unable to be master their emotions (53). This enchantment is closely related to the aesthetic, and Felski explains that it is the aesthetic aspect of literature that leads “inexorably to ontological confusion” and to a failure to “differentiate between fact and fantasy, reality and wish fulfilment.” (ibid.) In the enchanted state of experiencing art, affect and perception are closely related. Enchantment has a profound effect on a reader’s perception of literature. It may take away a sense of autonomy and self-control: the reader is not wholly in control of her emotions and responses to the literary work. Felski considers the state of enchantment to be similar to a condition of being intoxicated, drugged, or dreaming (55), which has the effect that the analytic, rational part of the mind becomes less involved, and the line between self
and text is being challenged and fades into a “confused and inchoate intermingling” (55). Similarly to Felski, Attridge also considers emotional responses to literature in relation to aesthetic enjoyment. He states that the “emotions aroused by fictional characters . . . or depicted events . . . are characteristic of much more than literary works,” because feelings that are a response to a literary work: “they are coloured by the pleasure we take in the representation itself, in the language whereby the emotional response is invited.” (85) This shows that although the relationship between affect and literature seems to be quite strong, it also is a relationship that is to some degree contested and underappreciated.
Affect and the Scholarly Habitus
Before focussing specifically on literary scholarship, I want to consider what it can look like when affect plays a role within academia more generally. As previous paragraphs have shown, affect is, at its most basic level, an important element to the way people experience the world around them, which, perhaps means that affect is also an unavoidable element of academic research. In scientific research, there has traditionally often been an attitude that asks the researcher to be unemotional in her attitude towards the research object. Anna Duszak writes about academic cultures and writing. She shows that in academic form, the academic writer is often encouraged to be “impersonal” (1). Criticising this, she writes: “The sacrum of knowledge and truth is at the mercy of a medium that is profane and a uses who fallible. For the sake of scientific purity and veracity, a plain and impersonal language was recommended – a language devoid of emotional language and interpersonal meanings, of fuzzy expressions and of intellectual […] bias. All this [contributes] to the image of a dehumanized writer/reader.” (1) In this next paragraph, I want to explore what it means for affect to be considered a part of the act of performing research and writing academic papers.
The first point I would like to address in relation to affect in scholarship is that there is, or at least, has been, a strict division between emotion and rationality in academia. This point relates closely to the previous discussion of enchantment, affect, and rationality. In
Emoties en Rationaliteit, Frijda and Pott explain: “van oudsher worden emotie en rationaliteit
als tegenpolen gezien. Emoties ontrekken zich volgens de wijsgerige traditie aan redelijke overwegingen, vormen een inbreuk op of schakelen onze rationale vermogens zelfs compleet uit (…)” (133). Tellegen and Frankhuizen note that, even if there have been major changes in academia since the publication of Emoties en Rationaliteit, the division between emotion and rationality is still present. They explain that the main goal of literary education is to teach people to approach a text rationally, and that this is considered part of the maturation process (68). In more recent years, however, research has started to acknowledge that it may not be the lack of emotional response that is crucial to the maturation process, but the “diversiteit van emotionele believing naarmate de ontwikkeling van een individue voorschrijdt naar volwassenheid.” (Tellegen and Frankhuizen 69) Similarly, Sarah Ahmed states that “‘emotion’ has been viewed as ‘beneath the faculties of thought and reason,’” (3) and explains that this is closely related to a fear that emotion leads to passivity. Passivity in turn, is tied to “the fear of emotionality in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others.” (Ahmed 2-3) In academic research, the idea that a researcher may be shaped and influenced by others could be undesirable as it leads to subjectivity as opposed to objectivity. This attitude towards emotion and rationality had a profound effect on research practices. Tellegen and Frankhuizen explain that academic guidebooks and manuals often discourage people from focussing too much on emotion, even as a research subject, stating that “men zich als onderzoeker beter kon bezighouden met cognitie en leerprocessen, want dan werd men gerespecteerd.” (68). Additionally, Ahmed makes an interesting point in noting that, if we follow Sartre’s conceptualisation of emotion, “emotions involve appraisals,
judgement, attitudes . . . which are irreducible to bodily sensations (5). Emotion can thus be seen as being closely connected to opinion, leading to the question of why are emotional responses of researcher so often discounted, if they do in fact shape experience and responses.
Following this, I want to consider the role of the researcher. The affective turn has had a major effect on type of scholarship that is being performed. Ioanes explains that the affective turn is “often associated with “postcritical” methods, including surface reading (Best and Marcus 2009) and reparative reading (Sedgwick 2002)” (Ioanes 57). In different fields, the researcher is given a significantly different role in research projects. Marilyn Simon explains that in qualitative study, the researcher is considered to be an instrument of data collection, meaning that the collected data are mediated through “a human instrument” (“The Role of the Researcher” n.p.). She argues for the importance of the researcher being aware and describing relevant aspects of the self “including biases and assumptions, any expectations, and experiences to qualify his or her ability to conduct the research” (ibid.). An important element of this is that the researcher should explain whether their role is “emic”, an insider or participant, or “etic,” where the researcher would have more of an outside
perspective, and be an objective viewer. In the Humanities, this is a rare occurrence. However, there are fields where the affective relationship of a researcher is acknowledged. An important example of this is Gender studies, where the practice of including an
ethnography is becoming more and more common. Reflecting on why this practice is important to Gender Studies, Nancy Naples explains that “an embodied perspective . . . emphasizes how researchers’ social positions . . . influence what questions we ask, whom we approach in the field, how we make sense of our . . . experience, and how we analyse and report our findings” (Napels 197).
A final brief point I would like to make about the role of emotion within academia is that the academic world can be considered to be a type of community, an idea that can be connected to Bourdieau’s previously mentioned habitus. This academic community can have an effect on the allowance and acceptability of certain forms of emotional expression. The accepted form of scholarship becomes the academic habitus. In her book, Emotional
Communities, Barbara Rosenwein focuses on the history of emotions. She examines the
Middle Ages and challenges a traditional view that the Middle Ages can be treaded as one emotional period, explaining that there, normally, there can exist several emotional
communities alongside each other. Rosenwein explains that an emotional community is a group “in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions” (2). We could consider the academic community to be an emotional community, or to contain several emotional communities. In certain fields of academic research, there may be more or less space for emotional expression. We may consider academic writing to be the output of the academic emotional community.
Affect and Literary Scholarship
As I have shown, affect and emotion are important topics in relation to literature. It seems strange therefore, that within literary studies, affect is not often acknowledged as having an influence on research practices. There are, however, a few examples. Firstly an example of affect being acknowledged within literary studies is in the work of Deirdre
Lynch. In her book Loving Literature, Lynch examines the role of love in the development of English literary studies, and focuses specifically on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century. She shows that in this period, the professional nature of English scholars became deeply connected to their love of literature, and their need to inspire this love in others (1). However, while it is interesting to have this relationship acknowledged, this also relates back to what
Felski explains in Uses of Literature, where she states that it is perhaps partially because of the fear of returning to a state in academia where this need to inspire love in others turns into a situation where professors are “swooning,” rather than engaging critically. As I have stated before, people like O’Sullivan and Felski have shown that the affective responses to art are often considered to work against the academic habitus of rationality (O’Sullivan 125-6, Felski 54-55).
In relation to this idea of emotion leading to subjectivity in research, Martha Nussbaum, in Love’s Knowledge, states that novels “both represent and activate our emotions,” which means that when we work with novels, our work “is marred by
irrationality.” (40) She continues by stating that novels “are not likely . . . to contribute to rational reflection.” (ibid) I want to return briefly to Felski’s idea of enchantment. It could be questioned if enchantment with a literary work also occurs for academic readers, and what effect this would have on their research. Felski explains, however, that the idea of being enchanted with a work does not carry a lot of currency in literary theory, “calling up
scenarios of old-school professors swooning in rapture over the delights of Romantic poetry” (“Enchantment” 54). However, the focus and appreciation of rationality over emotion, and this idea that researchers cannot acknowledge or are allowed to experience enchantment (or any other emotional connection) to a literary work, does not mean that this connection does not exist.
As literary scholarship functions within the larger framework of academia, the high value of objectivity and rationality are present within literary studies as well. In order to understand how literary scholars reflect on this, I have analysed the interviews with the three researchers. In the interviews I conducted, a few interesting points came forward, and it becomes clear that affect does indeed seem to play a role in developing ideas and arguments
in literary scholarship. However, the expression, acknowledgement, and even the value of this affect and the affective responses can be complicated.
Firstly, all three respondents acknowledged that emotional responses to literature happen to them (Respondent A 72, Respondent B 84), with respondent C stating that emotion can be “a key to learning,” and that it helps to “get ideas” (95). Additionally, respondent B noted that places in a work that bring on emotional responses are “often good things to write about because there’s some sort of culmination going on there, some kind of crescendo in the writing” (85). Similarly, respondent A shows, through an example, that emotions often work to note important scenes or elements of a work: emotion, in this case humour in Pride and
Prejudice is used to in order to teach and that scenes are effective because of the combination
of satire and sentiment (75).
Interestingly, all respondents seemed to agree that while emotional responses are indeed important, even more important is to reflect on why these emotional responses happen at particular points in a work. Respondent A noted that it was important to reflect on a
personal response to literature by saying: “Dus daar moet je over reflecteren. Een mix van ratio en emotie,” (73) and respondent B discussed how, when writing poetry, the emotional response is only one element, saying that “it’s the spontaneous feeling that is pulled out of you by something you see or experience, but then you don’t write the good poem at that moment you have to come back and think and with space and time work through that emotional response,” and that this could be good advice for writing criticism as well (85). Additionally, respondent B explained that the affective or emotional aspect of reading and studying literature can be very productive because “feeling and emotion come into this creative process of production that we do when we write about literature,” (77) and in a similar point, respondent C noted that having a personal attachment to work helps to become more innovative in research. Reflecting on subject choices in the past, respondent C noted:
“I’m still thinking I would have done it with much more energy if I had, if it had been my favourite, I would have known more and I would have been more intuitively attuned to it, and probably more innovative in that way” (89).
However, while acknowledging that emotion can have an effect on them and that they can play an important and even productive role in research, all respondents were aware of the tension that affect and emotion bring to academia, and noted that there is, to some extent, a danger in the emotional relationship between scholar and literary work. For example, it was noted that it was difficult to find the right form to reflect emotional responses in research and that emotional responses can be dangerous.
Firstly, Respondent A noted that it is possible to be “meegetrokken” (70) by a literary work, and in a similar statement, respondent B states that “works of literature are powerful things, . . . they can pull us along” (77). Additionally, respondent B noted that emotional responses in academic research are complicated and that it is “quite hard to write about your feelings without falling into some purely subjective thing” because, firstly “it’s a very limited set of date,” and secondly, “it can’t really be challenged” (78). Respondent B also noted that too much love can become boring: “I think there’s a danger either way, if you’re writing about stuff you love it’s really risky, and that’s actually more boring I would say” (80). It was also noted that “loving something is more dangerous than hating it, because then you do this psychoanalytic thing of projecting things, were you want to see it as your ideal self or as embodying the same ideals, and . . . that’s going to be an illusion” (86).
The respondents also explained that while affective responses can indeed help to develop interest in a work or topic, it also works the other way around. Respondent A notes that the more you know about a topic, “dan raak je daar ook steeds meer geïnteresseerd in, naarmate je er meer van leest en over leest en meer van weet wordt het ook spannender” (70) and respondent C explains that when selecting a topic to study, it is important to work on
something that is interesting because “when something is interesting, I feel emotionally switched on” (79).
Reflecting on the idea of using ethnographic paragraphs at the beginning of papers as a way of including personal background into academia, the respondents seemed to feel ambiguously about this. Respondent A notes that while it was an understandable practice, it was also felt that this practice can lead to identity politics, stating “je moet ook proberen op dat moment om over je eigen vooroordelen of oordelen of emoties . . . te stijgen en te kijken,” and continuing by adding that “ik weet weld at totale objectiviteit natuurlijk total mogelijk is, maar het is wel iets waar we naar moeten sterven” (74). Similarly, respondent B wonders, while stating that “that’s a sort of interesting thing”, “why we feel that that’s something that needs to be done or why we might feel uncomfortable about that is worth thinking about” (85). Interestingly, Respondent C first states: “I’m not a fan of that. There is a case to be made for it, but it goes against what I consider the value of academic research,” but then continues by saying
But you know, . . . it’s a complex field. Our subject is not entirely scientific. It is, partly. I’m more interested in the scientific side of it, the knowledge related side, but for instance, if you see writing as mostly a political act, and you want to move people to do stuff, well you couldn’t get me to do stuff through these emotional appeals, I find them suspicious, but many people are affected by it, [more] than by my approach, so I could see how it has certain value (91). These interviews show that the scholars seem to be aware of their affective responses, and even acknowledge that they can influence research practices in terms of deciding what to study, what elements of a work are interesting and worth discussing, and seem to drive creativity, making affect an overt part of a research method seems difficult. The interviews show that to some extent, there is a fear of especially emotions such as love negatively
influencing research by making the argument flat and less interesting, and there seems to be a desire to strive for objectivity.
Fan Culture and Fan Journals
The focus so far has been on the relationship between affect and literary works in an academic environment. In order to explore the relationship between academic researchers and their objects of study in a more comprehensive way, I also want to turn the attention to the way in which academics participate in fan culture. My hypothesis is that within fan culture, there is more space to show (and perhaps strengthen) an affective attachment to a literary work or author.
Firstly, I would like to consider John Thompson’s work on the relationship between cultural products and the development of the self. Thompson examines the process of self-formation since the start of Modernity, and explains that, “with the development of modern societies, the process of self-formation” has become “more reflexive and open-ended,” meaning that individual people increasingly “fall back on their own resources to construct a coherent identity for themselves” (207). Interestingly, Thompson shows the relationship that people developed in the interaction with, for example, a literary work, allows for the
establishment of an intimacy, which is similar to the argument Rita Felski makes on how people can develop forms of attachments to literary works. However, Thomson explains that this mediated interaction between work and audience, is “essentially non-reciprocal” (208). Perhaps in an effort to counteract the non-reciprocal relationship between reader and literary object, fan communities may offer space for developing a more reciprocal experience of affect. Thompson explains that fan communities are communities of people who focus on a specific icon or object in which “individuals can . . . feel deeply involved at a personal and emotional level” (Thompson 224).
This change in the process of self-formation coincides with the development of fan communities. Matthew Hills explains that, from the twentieth century onward, there has been a growth in the proliferation of the media “cults,” whose “fandoms routinely cluster around and valorize film, television, and related popular cultural texts (73). For many years, people have, to some extent, looked down on fandom and fan cultures. Thompson explains that becoming a fan of a cultural product can provide an individual “with the means of enacting a relationship or forming a bond,” that can be incorporated into a project of, what Thompson calls “self-formation” (224). Additionally, Thompson characterizes fandom as a symbolic project of the self, stating that “the deep personal and emotional involvement of individuals in the fan community is also a testimony to the fact that being a fan is an integral part of a project of self-formation” (224), meaning that both the relationship people experience between themselves and the cultural product, and the enactment of this relationship within a fan community can become an essential part of their sense of self.
Mainly linked to pop culture specifically, fan cultures have often not considered to be places where critical thinking was encouraged or happened. Research into fan communities often examines fan communities that centre on popular genres, such as Young Adult fiction (Franssen 362) or Science Fiction (Jenkins 11). These popular genres were often considered to “appeal to the audience’s most debased needs and desires, making them even more passive, more ignorant and noncritical than they apparently already are” (Grossberg 51). Additionally, fans were considered to be either “incapable of recognizing that the culture they enjoy is actually being used to dupe and exploit them” or they were assumed to always be “juveniles, waiting to grow up, and still [enjoy] the irresponsibility of their fandom” (ibid.) Henry Jenkins, discussing a specific fan community surrounding Star Trek, shows that these fans are, for example, characterized as “kooks obsessed with trivia, celebrities, and
single women”; as childish adults; in sort, as people who have little or no “life” apart from their fascination” (11). However, as Laurence Grossberg explains, history has shown us that there are no set criteria that can define the difference between popular cultural products and other forms of cultural texts, such as high culture, mass culture, and folk culture.
However, there is a growing movement of scholars that recognises the labour that fans and fan communities have been and are doing, and recognise the possibility of the development of criticism within fan communities. There is a growing interesting in fan practices that, as Mark Duffet explains, “blur the distinction between reading and writing,” (166) alluding to the turn to production that often happens in fan communities. Lawrence Grossberg provides a perspective on what what fan communities can offer. Grossberg starts by exploring the relationship between audience and texts and explains that they
“continuously remade – their identity and effectiveness reconstructed – by relocating their place within different contexts.” Audiences play an important role in the “continuous reconstruction of cultural contexts,” which allows them to “consume, interpret and use texts in specific ways” (54). Contrary to the common perception of fans as passive, Grossberg explains that scholars have to acknowledge that “the relationship between the audience and popular texts is an active one,” and that the “meaning of a text is not given in some
independently available set of codes which we can consult at our own conveniences.” (52) Grossberg refers to the relationship that binds “cultural forms” and audiences together as “a sensibility,” which he explains is “a particular form of engagement or mode of operation” that it “defines the possible relationships between texts and audiences located within its spaces” (54). Fans, he further explains, relate to this sensibility in a specific way. He states that “the fan’s relation to cultural texts operates in the domain of affect” (56). This affective element to fandom is important because, Grossberg shows, it allows for “absorption or investment” (57). This absorption allow for the development of “places at which we can
construct our own identity as something to be invested in” (ibid.) Through active
participation in fan behaviour and fan communities, cultural products can become, to the fan, “a crucial ground on which he or she can construct mattering maps” (59).
Continuing this focus fandom through affect that Grossberg proposes, I want to discuss two important concepts, namely Fan Labour and Affective Labour. Building on Pierre Bourdieau’s theory on cultural capital scholars of fan studies examine and explain the labour that fans put in to their chosen fan community, even if there is no possibility of monetary rewards. While no monetary reward is part of the exchange between fan and outside world, Jennifer Spence explains that these theories still understand as the labour that fans perform in terms of “what fans get out of it” (23), things like “access and recognition” (22). However, Spence makes the argument that affective labour is perhaps more important within fan communities than fan social or cultural capital. Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri explain that while affective labour is immaterial, it is simultaneously “corporeal and affective” (293), meaning that the effect of affective labour are “intangible,” such as “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (293). Affective labour creates “social networks, forms of community” (293). However, what I want to consider in this thesis is another aspect of fan labour. Where these theories show that part of what drives a fan is the social or cultural capital they gain, I want to consider that what drives a fan is the emotional attachment they feel to a literary work or author, and that this attachment drives them to a productive, and sometimes, creative act.
While research into fan communities and fan activity has become more common in recent decades, there is very little interest in the academic as fan. In his seminal work Textual
Poachers, Henry Jenkins studies television fans, and reflects on the difficulty of
acknowledging that academics may also be fans, and explains why there seems to be such a lack of interest in the academic fan. Jenkins identifies himself as a participant of fan culture.
In the introduction to his book, he analyses whether his personal involvement in fan culture complicates his work as a scholar. He explains that writing as a fan “about fan culture poses certain potential risks for the academic critic” (6) in terms of objectivity. However, he also recognises that it offers him “a certain understanding and forms of access impossible through other positionings” (ibid.).
In this thesis, I am focussing on two canonical authors and the academic readers they attract. As I stated previously, most research into fan communities and fan activity focuses on works within popular culture, and even within that framework, it is more often focused on movies and television than literary works. Gaston Franssen and Zosha de Rond explain that the literary fan is not often recognised: “De ‘literaire fan’ lijkt in eerste instantie een vreemd en zeldzaam wezen te zijn” (361). Franssen and de Rond argue that, even though magazines focussing on authors or literary works are often not considered to be part of fan activity, author-focused magazines can function as forms of popular culture by offering readers the possibility “zich te onttrekken aan geformaliseerde en geïnstitutionaliseerde
cultuurparticipatie” and “zich het werk en het imago van de bewonderde auteur eigen te maken en zodoende een eigen socio-culturele positie in te nemen” (365).
Academic Writing and Creativity
Finally, what this chapter and these interviews show is that there is a relationship between affect and creativity present in literary studies. According to Isobel Armstrong, one of the most important methodological tools available to the literary scholar is close reading. This practice combines affect and analysis. In Armstrong’s reconsideration of close reading, the binary between thought and feeling are dismantled, and affective responses can become part of a critical reading of a text (418). Academic writing, not dissimilarly from the writing of prose or poetry, is a way of transmitting an idea. In “What is the Creative Act,” Gilles
Deleuze states that “ideas have to be treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from the mode of expression” (312). The ideas that we are able to express are deeply connected to the mode of expression. Deleuze states that it is possible for him to have an idea “in a certain domain,” such as “an idea on cinema or an idea in philosophy” (312). Both literature and academia consist in some way of “creating and inventing concepts” (ibid.), and I would argue that in the case of literary criticism, not
unimportantly, the consideration of concepts and literary works can lead to new ideas. Ronald Bledow, Kathrin Rosing, and Michael Frese argue that affective states are “among the
determinants of creativity” (432). Affective responses to literature can lead to a productive and creative act: moments of intensity that are experienced by the reader, can then be unpacked through a process of close reading, and can become part of new ideas.
Chapter 2
Affect in Academic Writing
“The person . . . who has not the pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 72
In the interview with respondent B it is stated that what we, meaning literary scholars, “have to be careful of” is that “works of literature are powerful things, they can pull us along” (76). As I have shown in the previous chapter, it has been acknowledged that affective responses to art and literature can happen, that people form attachments to literary works, and that this affective relationship can have an effect on the way people form opinion and come to understand literary works: it influences what works and topics they focus on, drives interest, helps innovative and creative readings, and can focus the attention on important parts of a literary work. Simultaneously, within the academic world it can be recognised that objectivity and rationality are generally valued over subjectivity, and there appears to be a fear that having an affective response to works of art may complicate the value of research. However, within literary studies the affective relationship between literary scholar and object of study is occasionally acknowledged as, for example, Deidre Lynch shows, and also becomes visible in the conversations with the scholars. In order to understand the influence of affect and emotion on academics and their work I want to explore whether affect can be shown in an academic context, and if so, in what way are academics representing their affective
responses. In this chapter, I will examine in an author-focused academic journal, in order to see if and how affect is reflected in academic writing. As the previous chapter has shown, affect is considered to be a pre-linguistic and “extra-textual” (O’Sullivan 126). However, in this chapter, I am analysing textual representation of affective responses. This, of course, seems contradictory. In order to analyse role of affect in research, it is important to consider
what place statements or attitudes that show emotional attachment or responses can have. This does mean that this analysis can never show what types of affective responses people have had when reading a work. Therefore, the focus will be on if and how they choose to represent their responses to literary works.
Jane Austen Scholarship and Fan Culture
In order to study the way academics function in both a fan environment and an academic environment, the focus will be on the 2016 edition of Persuasions. Persuasions is not only a productive place to study the affective relationship between scholar and object of study because it is an example of an author-focused journal, it is also interesting because of the type of response Jane Austen specifically has received, both academically as well as
non-academically. As Marjorie Garber explains: “More than any other authors I know, Austen and Shakespeare provoke outpourings of love” (200). Garber refers to the adoration of Austen, and the market that has sprung up surrounding the author as the “Jane Austen
Syndrome.” (ibid.) However, interestingly, it is also precisely this popularity that has led to a fair amount of contention within both Austen fan-communities and Austen scholarship.
Deirdre Lynch, for example, wonders if “there are any other writers who have seemed so vulnerable to being loved by so many in so wrongheaded a way?” (“Introduction” 7) She further explains that one way in which reader’s of Austen, both academic and non-academic have been able to distinguish themselves is by regretting “that others simply will insist on liking her in inappropriate ways,” (8) by which she means that readers have often focussed on, for example, the sentimental aspects of Austen’s works for which they sometimes receive a backlash from other Austen readers. In his famous 1928 address entitled “Jane Austen: A Depreciation,” H.W. Garrod “attacks the whole notion of Austen’s greatness on sexual grounds” (Johnson 30), and showed the scorn that has been turned on admirers of Austen.
Similarly, work by D.W. Harding set the tone for Austen scholarship in the 1940s, when, in his essay “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen,” he stated that Austen’s fate has been that she has been “read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked,” and that “in order to enjoy her books without disturbance, those who retain the conventional notion of her wok must always have had slightly to misread what she wrote at a number of scattered points,” (6) strongly implying that he believes there is a correct way of reading a literary work. Similarly, Claudia Johnson explains that “the history of Austen criticism has often been darkened by the scorn of Austen-haters.” (149) Especially male admirers of Austen “have had much to endure at the hands of a world that frowns upon their love,” (30) with, for example Garrod considering men to have “unmanned themselves not simply by admiring a woman writer . . . but, even worse, by idolizing a sharp-tongued woman unimpressed by men.” (Johnson 149) Nowadays, these types of claims are found more
frequently in popular discourse on Austen than in scholarship, with commentators criticizing on the one hand “theory-obsessed academics” and the stereotypical fan of Austen on the other, who, as Lynch explains, is often considered to be part of the “the so-called frilly bonnet brigade . . . who go to the movies for the costumes and for romance” (“Introduction” 8). The disdain for this type of `fan of Austen is expressed by Boyd Tonkin, who states that the time has come to “rescue Jane form the Janeites” (“Emma”).
This constructed distinction between the objective, theory-focused academic and the emotional, romantic non-academic reader, may have led to a lack of space for the expression of affect especially within Austen scholarship. The expression of affect and emotion, and especially of positive emotional responses such as love and admiration, can easily be linked to fan-behaviour, which may not be an attractive image for an academic writer, and as Lynch states, “those who read Austen outside the disciplinary and disciplined parameters of the literary tradition” have faced complaints made against them (“Introduction” 10). Johnson
further explains that Janeites, fans of Austen, “constitute a reading community whose practices violate a range of protocols later instituted by professional academics” (149-50). For a scholar, the association with being a “janeite,” therefore might be dangerous. Affective responses to Austen and her works function within the larger space of Austen scholarship, and as we can recognise in an analysis of the way Austen scholarship has developed, is not entirely apolitical within the field, especially when considering a journal such as Persuasions, which functions in both fandom and academia.
Jane Austen Society of North America and Persuasions
To examine the way an affective relationship between a scholar and a literary work may be represented in scholarship, I am focussing on the journal Persuasions. Persuasions is the annual, peer-reviewed journal by the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). In the previous chapter, I discussed emotional communities, as conceptualised by Barbara
Rosenwein. In the case of Persuasions, the JASNA could be considered to be an important element in shaping the emotional community, and therefore determine what types of expressions are appropriate within the society and the journal, of Persuasions.
In her book Janeites, Deirdre Lynch examines both non-academic and academic fan communities surrounding Austen. Talking about the response to the formation of one particular Chapter of the JASNA, she states the following: “The newspaper article reporting the formation of the Connecticut Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America tells interested parties to arrive at the first meeting to vote for their favourite Austen character and ten suggests that persons who see themselves as “expert lecturers” had better stay away” (3). The Society is said to attract “readers, not academics” (ibid.). This seems to suggest that there is a strict separation between readers and academics, and even suggests that academics read (Austen) in a significantly different way than non-academic readers.
The Jane Austen Society of North America is “dedicated to the appreciation of Jane Austen and her writing,” asking members to “join [them] in celebrating [Austen’s] life, her works, and her genius,” further explaining that they are “a non-profit organization, staffed by volunteers, whose mission is to foster among the widest number of readers the study,
appreciation, and understanding of Jane Austen’s works, her life, and her genius” (“About JASNA”). Persuasion itself is described as “JASNA’s annual, peer reviewed print journal” (“Persuasions”) and is included in JASNA membership. The journal “offers essays on Jane Austen’s writing, her world, and her legacy in literature and other media” (ibid.) This raises the question of what the agenda behind both the JASNA and Persuasions is, and how the broader goals, of celebrating Austen’s life and works, of the JASNA may have an effect on the journal.
The JASNA clearly states that, as a society, they have a clear goal within the Austen fan community and even if the journal itself strives to be an independent academic journal, the extent in which, for example, more critical readings of Austen may have a place within the journal could be questioned. This can be recognised both in the description of the goals of the society as a whole, with its emphasis on celebrating Austen, and in the editor’s note to the 2016 edition of the journal, where Susan Allen reflects on this edition of Persuasions by stating: “the essays assembled here are the most visible signs of the goodly heritage of JASNA and the larger Austen-reading community” (9). Her emphasis on the “goodly
heritage,” when read in relation to the JASNA’s broader goals, shows that the journal perhaps also is interested in presenting a specific image of Austen as a great author.
This journal, therefore, is an interesting object to study precisely because it functions as an academic journal, but, as it is funded by the JASNA, also participates in furthering the goals of the JASNA. Additionally, as I have shown, within Austen scholarship, there is a history of affective relationships to her works and her authorial persona, which has led to a
