The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature
| dc.contributor.advisor | Wood, Mary | |
| dc.contributor.author | Ecklund, Ashley | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-08-07T22:57:59Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-08-07 | |
| dc.description.abstract | DISSERTATION ABSTRACTAshley Ecklund Doctor of Philosophy in English The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature This project addresses affectivity as an epistemological resource and affects as im/material phenomena that are expressed in certain works of literature as accumulating climates pertaining to specific bio-political events of violence. The texts discussed in this project are Charles Johnson’s work of short fiction “Exchange Value” (1981), Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus II (1986-1991), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997). Through both allusion and explicit content, these works address the allegedly distant catastrophes of the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, and Japanese American internment along with countless other entangled violences through grotesque imageries in the everyday late-capitalist settings of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. These earth-shattering and world-bending events are linked to the capitalist system-sustaining structures of our familiar daily routines such as buying a jacket at the mall, going to a country club for bingo, or driving down the highway during rush hour. Putting multiple contexts for different global events together through three texts which are partially set and published in the 1980s-1990s United States has allowed me to show how narratives reach across time and place to spatialize catastrophically violent histories via resonant affective connections; though distinct in terms of context, narrative form, and genre, each text centers capitalism as constitutive for ongoing catastrophic conditions and develops images of affect through the texture of everyday material living conditions. For this project, texturing, in terms of “The Texture of Affect,” is an encapsulation of violent histories into the atmosphere of narrative frames, the syntax of drawn patterns, and prose imagery which work to inscribe affect as tangible, palpable, and mattering in a polysemic sense. With vivid sensory detail, and other text-specific choices in form, these works show the importance of situating global catastrophes outside the concept of one-off tragedy. This dissertation includes previously published material. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 2026-07-23 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29852 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Affect Theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | Charles Johnson | en_US |
| dc.subject | Derrida | en_US |
| dc.subject | Materialism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Maus | en_US |
| dc.subject | Tropic of Orange | en_US |
| dc.title | The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of English | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |