This chapter investigates what I call the “smiling deadpan” of Black cakewalkers during the vaudeville era, when Black comedians and dancers performed racialized affective conventions in ways that were both familiar and subtly transformative. The cakewalk began before the Civil War as a joke dance where enslaved people parodied the manners of white plantation owners. It was appropriated by white blackface minstrel performers and then re-adopted and adapted by Black cakewalkers, some of whom were also minstrel performers. These layers of racial parody made it difficult to say who or what was being mocked by vaudeville-era cakewalkers. While Mark Twain describes the cakewalk as a “grave deportment-tournament,” emphasizing its deadpan qualities, twentieth-century Black cakewalkers stipulate that the dance must be performed with a professional smile. This chapter considers the interplay between gravity and smiling to show how Black cakewalkers performed and redeployed racialized comic conventions. It demonstrates how racialized aesthetics form part of deadpan’s aesthetic history.

How does a protest feel? This chapter shows that affect is central to our ordinary ideas of protest and a site on which a gathering’s political legibility is contested. Public discourses about the Riots/Uprising and anti-Prop. 187 march indicate shared expectations that protests be affectively rational and those affects be politically directed. Focusing on anger, the chapter finds that the political anger of protest has social sense and is moderated and directed to collective ends. Affective rationality is thus connected to social intentionality and contributes to consolidating the performative effect of an instrumental political collectivity. These terms of legible political anger, however, are racialized in ways that circumscribe the legibility of Black protest. As the chapter shows, a constrained political anger was more available to the Latino-coded participants of the anti-Prop. 187 march than it was to participants of the Riots/Uprising, who were depicted erroneously as mostly Black. Within hegemonic discourses, the affective experiences of both were made opaque. Drawing on Stanley Cavell, the chapter argues that public gatherings are affectively charged performative invitations and concludes that their political unintelligibility instances an affective opacity and refusal of those invitations.

This chapter considers MacDonald’s work as a scholar and lecturer. From his 1859 appointment as professor of English literature and philosophy at Bedford College, to his (often sold-out) lecture tours in Britain, Europe, and North America, to the publication of his annotated Folio-based edition of Hamlet in 1885, MacDonald’s work as a scholar took various forms over the course of his literary career. What remained consistent, however, was his insistence that the critic should take a generous, affective approach, prioritising strengths over weakness and helping readers to experience the works at an emotional level. Drawing on both unpublished lectures and published scholarly works such as A Dish of Orts (1893) and the edition of Hamlet, this chapter explores MacDonald’s emphasis on the multivalence of texts, which anticipates post-critical approaches. However, the chapter also places him in dialogue with nineteenth-century critics Matthew Arnold and F. G. Fleay in order to draw out the distinctiveness of his critical approach within his context.

The Introduction theorizes the relationships between tragedy affect and labor within modern US fiction. Affect is key to showing how and in what forms a classical mode like tragedy persists into late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels. Likewise a study of the changing organization of labor – a shift in wage work toward jobs described as immaterial or affective – is central to understanding why and under which historical conditions we see the resurgence of tragedy as affect in major works of literature. Literature in this argument articulates the collective imaginary of a people in a specific time and place. The chapter proposes that the apposition of an ill-fated and newly created class of immaterial laborers during the economic and political crises of the postwar period generates a tragic structure of feeling. Tragedy resides as both a form and a feeling that are as much concerned with the fearful misery of singular characters caught up in domestic dramas as with collective suffering played out on a public (and more overtly political) stage.

Stoic psychology is distinctive in the ancient tradition: it takes the mentality of a mature human being to be rational through and through, rejecting Platonic and Aristotelian commitments to distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. Critics who assume the implausibility of psychological monism typically fail to track the distinction between (a) what is rational in the sense of requiring the resources of a rational mind (rational-1) and (b) what is rational in the sense of meeting a normative standard of rationality (rational-2). The chapter isolates a common core to Stoic and Kantian conceptions of what it is to be rational-1 as the basis for interpreting Kant as a psychological monist. This interpretation is elaborated through the demonstration of its compatibility with Kant’s threefold faculty psychology. Kantian psychological monism is rooted in a claim about apperceptive self-consciousness as the fundamental resource of a rational-1 mind, and which transforms the powers of cognition, desire, and feeling in us. The final section examines Kant’s explicit endorsement of Stoic apathy as evidence of his clear-sighted appropriation of elements of Stoic psychology.

This chapter uses Amis’s memoir Experience and his final novel Inside Story to examine rhetorical conventions about autobiography and autofiction. It surveys broader themes of authenticity and affectation in the works through more localised issues of identity construction. Both books extend identity across a spectrum that spans bodily, performative, and affective selves. Using ideas from genre history, queer theory, affect theory, and masculinity studies, the chapter answers the investigative question of why Amis, at the end of his long, distinguished career, didn’t write another memoir but opted instead for autofiction.

This chapter focuses on increasing flexibility in self- and emotion-patterns, suggesting a process-oriented and patient-oriented perspective on psychopathology and psychotherapy. Such an approach can take into account the notions of affective atmosphere and the importance of external environmental factors, including social processes, in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. The notion of a self-pattern as a dynamical gestalt allows for a systematic approach to understanding and treating such disorders. Specifically, it allows us to zoom in on the affective factors that include emotions, constituted as their own dynamical patterns, to discover the connections among the various features of self-pattern, and the pervasiveness of the affective in everyday life.

Affect makes us vulnerable to attention capture. William Burroughs explored the aesthetic functions of playing with and capturing attention through his comic routines, his writing and his performances. This chapter shows how the outrageousness of Burroughs’ routines and his iconic performances in “Chappaqua,” “Drugstore Cowboy” and “The Black Rider” break down defensiveness through laughter and expose the enablers and drivers of addiction, challenging us to rethink our vulnerabilities in the face of drugs, social institutions, and new forms of media. His comic routines and performances reveal the social drivers of addiction, such as the health system’s involvement in the opioid crisis and the War on Drugs’ investment in social control, and anticipate the capture and resale of attention leading to the contemporary “attention economy,” the profits of surveillance capitalism and engineered addiction to social media.

Emotions and motivation are tied intimately together. Some motivations are based in emotions: fear, anger, and disgust. In other cases, though not forming their bases, emotion strongly interact with motivation; for example, disgust can strongly interact with sexual and feeding motivations. The chapter asks – what are the general properties of emotion and what do all emotions have in common? Emotions serve functionally coherent roles in behaviour, conscious experience, cognition, and the organization of the body’s physiology. The chapter draws a distinction between emotion, affect, and mood. It discusses specific action tendencies and Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The chapter places central importance upon affective neuroscience. It reviews the evidence for seven basic affective systems as postulated by Jaak Panksepp: seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, panic/grief, and play. Links are described between these basic emotional systems and high-level cognition.