The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film ─ Affect Theory's Other

This book brings emotion and postmodernism into sustained dialogue, theorizing that both feeling theory in general, and its model of emotion in particular, may be unexpectedly enriched by an encounter with the field that has become feeling theory’s critical and disciplinary other—postmodernism. Across a series of radical re-reappraisals of canonical postmodern texts, primarily films, from Fredric Jameson’sPostmodernism to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Duncan shows that the same postmodern archive that has proven resistant to strongly subject-based and object-oriented emotions, like anger and sadness, proves all too congenial to the idiosyncratic, borderline emotions, from knowingness, fascination and bewilderment to boredom and euphoria, that the book takes as its critical objects.

Pansy Duncan is Lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand