Since the turn of the new millennium, studies of affect have emerged as one of the most burgeoning fields within literary and cultural studies, a theoretical trend in the West which we now designate as “the affective turn.” Over the past twenty years or so, scholars have drawn on increasingly diversified methodological approaches to tackle a wide array of issues related to affect or emotion. An edited volume published in 2010, The Affect Theory Reader, even went so far as to suggest eight theoretical trajectories that the editors thought frequently informed current academic discourses on affect: 1) phenomenology and post-phenomenologies of embodiment; 2) assemblages of the human/machine/inorganic such as cybernetics and neurosciences; 3) the non-humanist traditions in philosophy which have inspired feminists like Rosi Braidotti and theorists like Brian Massumi and Giorgio Agamben; 4) psychological and psychoanalytic inquiries exemplified by, say, Silvan Tomkins, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and Sigmund Freud; 5) politically engaged works in feminism, queer theory, and disability discourse, as well as critiques enunciated by other subaltern groups of people; 6) a turn away from the so-called “linguistic turn” toward work that took place alongside or well before the linguistic turn, such as Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” or Walter Benjamin’s “sensual mimesis”; 7) discourses of emotion that tackle atmospheres of sociality, crowd behavior, and contagion of feelings, among other things; and 8) practices of science and science studies....
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