William Lee Hughes
Published: 2019
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This dissertation explores the relationship between serialized narratives and discourses of feeling and emotion in the nineteenth century. I argue that feeling and emotion must be understood in historical and discursive terms, rather than simply in terms of biology and cognition. Furthermore, the form in which these discourses are mediated shapes them as well. The advent of popular serial fiction at the beginning of the Victorian period had profound effects on these discourses at a pivotal moment in capitalist modernity. Analyzing the way in which serial fiction gives form to discourses of feeling complicates our understanding of what it means to experience a feeling or emotion, particularly feelings which are thought to be natural and unchanging throughout history. The introduction provides background analyses of the historical context for my argument, outlining the rise of serial narratives from the late 18th century, through Dickens and the serialization of the Victorian novel to the use of serial forms in early 20th century film. Here, I also explain my use of Lacanian register theory and Raymond Williams’s theory of “structures of feeling” to intervene in critical discussions of affect. Under this framework, I describe any given structure of feeling in terms of three registers: feeling (imaginary), emotion (symbolic) and affect (real). Feeling is the part of the structure that one imagines can be contained in an individual subject while emotion is that part of the structure that is symbolically fungible and intersubjective; both should be understood in historically specific terms. In contrast, real affect, the core of the structure that resists being imagined or symbolized, is the transhistorical kernel or remainder whose resistance to being imagined or symbolized constitutes the conditions under which historically specific emotions and feelings are elaborated. In our current moment the cognitive appraisal model of emotion obtains, but this model can only account for affect as an individual, ahistorical phenomenon. Under the cognitive appraisal model, an individual assesses and evaluates a situation accompanied by physiological arousal in order to produce an emotional state. In contrast, I argue that serial media forms demonstrate the mediation that is necessary for feeling to be felt as such. A subject’s affective response is never individual; in order to be knowable, real affect must be relayed through an other, even if this other is imagined. In addition to individual feeling, structures of feeling should be understood to also include symbolic emotion, which is determined by historically specific discourses, and real affect, which is that part of the structure whose inability to be directly represented serves as the motor for the elaboration of both emotion and feeling over time. Crucially, real affect is nonrelational and impersonal; it both forms and deforms the emotions and feelings that serve as the infrastructure of relationality. To demonstrate how this affective dynamic plays out historically, I frame each chapter as a case study of a Victorian text. The first chapter analyzes the woodcut images in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop to argue against the prevailing notion that grief in the nineteenth century was a productive, social activity. Instead, I demonstrate that grief is an obstacle to social relationality. This is evident in its figuration as a stasis of time that arrests temporal progress; in serial fiction, grief turns out to be impersonal and nonrelational. While we are generally accustomed to thinking that anxiety is always already ordinary, the second chapter of my dissertation argues that this ordinariness has a history that is rooted in the mediation of the term “anxiety” in Victorian serial fiction. The older term, “anguish” comes to be replaced by “anxiety” and the serial repetition of the latter term modulates it such that ordinary anxiety becomes the most familiar and quotidian affect of capitalist modernity. The final chapter focuses on Joseph Conrad’s serial publication of Lord Jim and the discourse of “exhaustion,” which mediates affective relations between the main characters in the narrative. At the end of the nineteenth century, exhaustion emerges as a reified emotion and an epistemological category, such that knowledge of one’s affect can only be acquired once that affect has been mediated by exhaustion. The dissertation ends with a coda on early twentieth-century serial film, using The Hazards of Helen as its case study and exploring the relationship between serial form and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “affection-image,” the interval that establishes a qualitative relation between perception and action.