Affect theory is all the rage of late. James Noggle’s Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. As genealogy, it locates the origin of affect in an intractable problem that extends across genders, genres, and disciplines. As endorsement, it uses the terms and methods of affect theory to understand its past. Ingeniously, but also riskily, Noggle frames Unfelt as the history of an adverb, insensibly, used “to describe what could look, if described broadly and roughly enough, like the basic components of the ideology of modern Western liberalism” (192). As a mere adverb grows into an idiom and from there into an ideological force, so the chapters expand in scope, demonstrating “the consistency of the insensible as an idiom across a broad range” (18). Chapter 1 focuses on “minute particles that precede all sensory experience” in English and French empiricism (114); chapter 2 treats “the social zone of the courtship...
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Book Review|
December 01 2021
Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment
Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment
. By Noggle, James. Ithaca, NY
: Cornell University Press
, 2020
. xi + 266 pp.
Michael B. Prince
Michael B. Prince is associate professor of English at Boston University. His most recent books are The Shortest Way with Defoe: “Robinson Crusoe,” Deism, and the Novel (2020), winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize (2019); and Speaking of Writing: A Brief Rhetoric (2019), coauthored with Allegra Goodman. His essays “The Eighteenth-Century Beauty Contest” and “Religio Laici v. Religio Laici: Dryden, Blount, and the Origin of English Deism” appeared in the September 1994 and March 2013 issues of MLQ.
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Modern Language Quarterly (2021) 82 (4): 532–537.
Citation
Michael B. Prince; Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 2021; 82 (4): 532–537. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-9366009
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