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Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.

This chapter introduces the overall methodology and theoretical approach taken in the book, explaining the significance of the idea of the outsider in modernism. It then outlines the idea of the geographical emotions of modernism (drawing upon a term first coined by the writer Bryher). This is articulated by combining theories of literary geography with work on affect theory, mood, and emotion. Theorists drawn upon here include Silvan Tomkins, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, and Martin Heidegger. It argues for an understanding of modernism in these four European cities in terms of a regional transnationalism, situating this approach within current debates on global modernism. The chapter illustrates these arguments by a reading of Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury.

The conclusion presents some larger questions and opportunities raised by this argument. Spaces of Feeling revisits relatively old-fashioned subjective aspirations toward social exemplarity, autonomy, and self-knowledge in order to suggest that, even in this post-human day and age, it still takes us much effort to shed them. Through fictionalized and lyricized models of introspective thinkers beset by doubts about the speed, range, and independence of their inward reflections, it reframes our cognitive and affective liabilities as new points of entry into what we mean by self-awareness, and what our stakes are in attaching (or refusing to attach) value to it.

The introduction lays out this book’s methodology and main thesis. Spaces of Feeling takes modernist poems and novels as illustrations of an attitude toward affective awareness that has become lost from contemporary conversations about affect. By engaging with critics such as Lauren Berlant, Charles Altieri, Sianne Ngai, and Brian Massumi, as well as moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, it also highlights reasons why this attitude should, once more, become important to us.

The concluding chapter charts out potential critical links between Shakespearean comic melancholy and modern conceptualizations of melancholia in the works of Freud, Butler and Ngai. It argues that the comic philosophy of melancholy and of the melancomic, through its performative and affective dimensions, dovetails with the theoretical frameworks of all three writers. The chapter positions the representation of melancholy as a productive emotional marker akin to nostalgia in its conflation of sorrow and pleasure, as well as the artistic and creative repercussions that such a connection suggests over the years.

This chapter draws on the theoretical and methodological insights from Affect Control theory (ACT), a theory with decades of research and empirical support, to set up our cross-cultural analyses examing our theory of societal inequality. ACT is a formal mathematical theory used to examine how the various facets of social events (such as the identities and emotions) shape ongoing social action. ACT distills the representation of these various facets to their simplest, most universally recognized dimensions of meaning: evaluation (good vs. bad), potency (powerful vs. weak), and activity (fast vs. slow). ACT then provides a way of understanding and modeling social interactions so that it is possible to empirically compare the likely emotions resulting from the same types of interactions in various cultures. The chapter gives a broad overview of the theory so that the reader understands why it is useful and provides justification for the empirical analysis used in the book.

This chapter traces distinctions between three dynamics of feeling found in eighteenth-century literature and culture. “Sentimentality” emphasizes sameness and accord between parties. It can be associated with the pleasurable “repetition of the same” that defines genre fiction. “Sympathy,” as analyzed by Adam Smith, centers on the imaginative identification of self with other. It became the dominant model of feeling; indeed, it underwrites mainstream models of subjectivity, sexuality, and desire that are rendered legible by psychoanalysis. “Sensibility,” misread by psychoanalysis but illuminated by Deleuze and Hume, presents an alternative to sympathy. In place of the desire for identity, sensibility embraces an attraction to difference and differing. In place of the “container model” that situates affect within the depths of an individual or text, sensibility's contagious, performative affective intensities move from surface to surface. Typographical effects allowed a page to communicate affect in this way, as demonstrated by pages from John Dunton, William Baker, Sterne, and Mackenzie. Printer's manuals by Joseph Moxon and John Smith provide further evidence supporting the coherence of the textual practice of sensibility. The chapter briefly discusses the long neglect of printing by literary critics, and the recent revival of interest among critics and novelists (e.g. Mark Danielewski).

Taking its title from a line in the 2011 film We Can’t Change the World (But We Wanna Build a School in Cambodia), this chapter explores a recent fixation in Japan on rebuilding hope: first from the wreckage of the Bubble Economy and then from the debris of the 2011 tsunami. It uses this discussion to connect the expression of collective emotion to contemporary nationalism, and argues that this emotional language requires an exploration of the logic of narrative, as well as its consequences for the representation of a people’s feelings: of national sadness, or national pride, or national hope. Drawing heavily from recent debates about emotion and politics, the chapter introduces new ways of discussing narrative and its importance, particularly through Peter Brooks’s conception of “the melodramatic imagination.”

This chapter provides a primer on ACT data and analysis strategies provided by Interact, the computerized version of ACT. First, it describes the data sources for the Interact simulations before discussing how these categories of moral emotions are differentially felt across our five cultures via EPA dictionaries located in Interact. Next, it walks through an analysis strategy for generating likely moral emotional reactions across these cultures. To do so, it describes how Interact simulates social interaction by using empirically grounded, culture-specific equations.

The book concludes with this chapter summarizing the general argument, hopefully more compelling in light of our empirical support. Ultimately, we call for researchers to adopt alternate empirical approaches to test our argument that societal inequality is linked to culturally shaped moral codes and emotions. Gathering the data within a country to assess these interactional moral processes is almost prohibitively expensive, so it is difficult to replicate our ideas within a wider array of countries and methodological techniques. However, if this theory has merit, we hope others will pick up on the broad links between macro and micro to refine, or argue with, this admittedly ambitious thesis.

Chapter 9 presents our empirical results. The chapter begins with a description of the competing theories’ predictions for how the countries under analysis (the United States, China, Germany, Japan, and Canada) should differ by their moral reactions. We then present results demonstrating that the negative self-sanctioning and other-sanctioning moral emotions are far more common in the United States and China—countries with high levels of inequality. Conversely, the self-transcendent, communal moral emotions, like compassion and praise, are more often experienced in Germany, Japan, and Canada—countries with much lower inequality. This is consistent with our theoretical predictions.

This short conclusion uses two recent Japanese comedy movies — Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust and The World Sinks Except Japan — to consider how images of Japan’s past, present, and future are made emotionally meaningful. Both films target, with varying levels of sympathy, the emotional frames surrounding a dominant narrative of postwar Japan, and the chapter focuses especially on the ways in which generational change affects the resonance of these frames. The chapter considers the lenses through which even post-Bubble Japan can be re-envisioned – for example, as a “problem pioneer,” to use the term of the distinguished political scientist Kawashima Shin — as a global leader, if largely for its early discovery of and responses to the malaises likely to befall other great powers in the coming years.