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MCC Daily Tribune

Dr. Thomas Blake Co-Edits Groundbreaking Handbook on Affect Studies

This month, Palgrave MacMillan has published The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism. Co-edited by MCC's Thomas Blake (English/Philosophy) and Auburn University's Donald Wehrs, this groundbreaking project features articles penned by leading scholars in the field. Among these essays is Blake's own "Affect, Empathy, and Fiction." Moreover, according to the publishers, the collection "provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts--in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship." A remarkable accomplishment.

Anthony Leuzzi
English/Philosophy
11/14/2017