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This chapter focuses on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s little-known breast cancer advice column, “Off My Chest,” which she wrote from 1998 to 2003 for MAMM, a women’s cancer magazine, and A Dialogue on Love, a memoir of her therapy that records her struggle with her cancer diagnosis and metastasis. The chapter argues that Sedgwick’s journalistic and experimental writing circulates a public discourse of love that mediates her relationship to her own mortality. Sedgwick sets herself up as an object for collective identification. By disseminating pieces of herself in published works she strives to serve as an instrument for “good pedagogy” to counter the “bad pedagogy” of the cancer establishment. Influenced by Melanie Klein’s concept of reparation, which she regards as another word for love, she offers a Buddhist inflected teaching that recognizes life as an ongoing collaborative project sustained through the anonymous and impersonal love of readers she has never met, but who survive her death.

Reviewers' responses to Terry Eagleton's After Theory have, in part, been concerned with a comment made in the introduction: ‘Not all students are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world's population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day.’ This chapter examines the reviewers' responses to this quotation and argues that Eagleton is using wit and exaggeration as a means to shift perception rather than to give evidence. It also asserts that the reviewers are as much revealing something of their own assumptions about hair, gender and politics, as an understanding of Eagleton's arguments in After Theory. The Eagleton pubic hair quotation is reminiscent of another one, the debate around which is discussed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. What a comparison of the After Theory reviews to the Sedgwick makes clear is that both masturbation and pubic hair are about sexuality itself. The notions embedded in the Eagleton quotation are also reminiscent of Sigmund Freud's The Medusa's Head.

This introductory chapter discusses the role of affect, emotion, and sentiment in modernism and modernist literary criticism. Challenging the assumption that modernism represents a flight from feeling, the chapter suggests that modernist affect should be recognised as various and complex. The introduction traces the origins and key insights of theory’s “affective turn” at the end of the twentieth century, discussing the relationships between affect theory and poststructuralism and the distinctions between “affect” and “emotion.” While emphasising the diversity of contemporary theories of affect, materiality, and embodiment, the introduction outlines the distinctions between the two most significant strands of affect theory – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer revival of Silvan S. Tomkins’s psychobiology and Brian Massumi’s Deleuzian reading of Spinoza and Bergson.

This chapter reads Alan Hollinghurst's translations of Jean Racine (1639-1699), with particular emphasis on his 1990 translation of Racine's Bajazet (1672). It connects Hollinghurst's translations of this violent and anomalous tragedy with a range of artistic and theoretical work all from about 1990: Tony Kushner's translation of Corneille, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's use of Racine to develop her theory of the closet and Derek Jarman's Racinian-inflected film adaptation of Marlowe's Edward II, among others. Situating Hollinghurst's Racine in this cluster of works makes him part of a cultural energy that can only be read as a deeply skeptical response to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 declaration of 'the end of history'. Exploring the interplay between the specifics of Hollinghurst's translation and current theoretical work on queer temporality and theatrical time, the essay also connects Hollnghurst's Bajazet to the particularly intense phase of the AIDS epidemic with which it coincided and to cultural responses thereto.

This chapter examines a number of poems by John Ashbery. Ashbery’s poetry explores doubts about lyric expression’s dependence on its audience that are analogous to those voiced by Plath and Stevens. But like the novels discussed in earlier chapters, Ashbery’s lyrics also implicitly accept their speakers’ dependence, for their self-awareness, on audiences whose presence and attentiveness they cannot control. The mirror serves these speakers as a model for the intense, careful outward scrutiny that they constantly dream of but cannot consistently secure. As Ashbery’s speakers mistake for such mirrors paintings, daydreams, and natural landscapes, they reflect on the imperfect self-knowledge they can attain in a world from which such forms of outward support are not forthcoming—as well as on the way this desire for self-knowledge clouds their capacity to relate to their surrounding world. This notion of affect is further explored by juxtaposition against the views of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

A discussion of the work of Silvan S. Tomkins, who helped reinvigorate the study of the emotions in the 1960s by proposing a new theory of affect. Through the twin influences of Darwin and the new science of cybernetics, Tomkins proposed the existence of a limited number of universal "affect programs" or basic emotions, which he theorized as innately triggered responses that function independently of objects or cognitions. Through his influence especially on Paul Ekman and Carroll E. Izard, Tomkins set the stage for the emergence of an influential non-cognitive paradigm of the emotions.

This chapter argues for a broadening of the horizons of research to include documentary film representations of peoples, things, and issues of concern. It analyses the performative geography of two documentary films and offers an understanding of the geographical nature of performance and perfomative discourse through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s scholarship on the linguistic utterance. It employs Sedgwick’s notion of the periperformative to explore the ways in which the performative might be contested and radically altered. The two films, The Take and Les Glaneurs et al Glaneuse, offer a way of spatializing and broadening the economy that has implications for the performative potential of hybrid collectives.

Through a discussion of the moral realism of George Eliot in relation to British psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, and the work of D. W. Winnicott in particular, this chapter demonstrates that there develops within the history of psychoanalysis a framework by which healthy moral development within ordinary conditions is described and avowed. The general forms of psychoanalysis within literary studies to date have been oriented toward the structural, drive-based models of Freud and Klein, which promote an understanding of power and aggression as primary and ineluctable. Through a comparison of the development of the conceptions of the ordinary and traumatic in Winnicott, and the opposition between the tragic and the ordinary in Eliot, this chapter develops a conception of psychological health and moral aspiration amidst precarious conditions, including contingent environmental forces of aggression, rupture, and trauma.

Chapter 1 develops the theoretical claims behind the argument for familiar marriage, using psychological and anthropological research. It defines the terms “familiar marriage” and “romantic marriage” and demonstrates how reading from a familiar perspective can offer a useful counterweight to the individualist- and desire-centered work of Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, and Eve Sedgwick. What happens if one reads those same plots from the perspective of communally oriented goals while respecting the women’s point of view? Using Jane Eyre as an example, this chapter depicts marriage as a way for women to organize a future that guarantees the qualities they value.

This chapter explores the specific challenges that cognitive science and social psychology pose to those literary concepts and modes that are grounded in traditional moral understandings of selfhood and action, including integrity of character and notions such as tragic realization and moral repair. Focusing on the concept of moral time, the chapter explores two literary texts in which profound middle-of-life dramas take place: Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. A form of slow psychic time entirely lost to view in recent cognitive science is shown to take place in James’s tale, while The Winter’s Tale insists on the forms of moral and emotional experience that are beyond reflection and explanation. The readings presented are set in relation to key critical debates on the works, to challenge a persistent evasion of moral frameworks in contemporary anti-normative approaches.

The Introduction explores the idea of a supposed ‘unrationalized coexistence’ of competing sexual and political mores under the Restoration, some holdovers from the Ancien Régime, others peculiar to the new; the phrase ‘unrationalized coexistence’ is borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, but the concept is drawn from Restoration writers’ own depictions of the confused, transitional character of their society. The Introduction also examines the crucial rhetorical figure of ellipsis, which became in this period an unmistakeable means of evoking either the sexual, or the political, or both. The Introduction concludes by considering the notion of ‘Platonic love’—relationships characterized by unconsummated erotic desire—that was the most influential, though also the most contested, model of love in Restoration high art.