Uneasy Fellowships: The Modern Sentimental Subject and Her Affective SpheresSigrist, Clare (2020) Uneasy Fellowships: The Modern Sentimental Subject and Her Affective Spheres. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished) This is the latest version of this item.
AbstractUneasy Fellowships comprehends the novel through Émile Durkheim’s insight that “any communion of consciousness, in whatever form it takes place, enhances social vitality.” Reaching back to the complex eighteenth-century intellectual history of sentimental writing and theory, and closely analyzing key texts of the Harlem Renaissance and then recent religious fiction, Uneasy Fellowships offers a history of sentimental form that ponders its creative vision. Early sentimentalism summoned a certain reading practice—shaping readers who are moved by emotion, but not caught in its thrall. Harlem Renaissance novelists, negotiating sentimental inheritance, enacted a renewal that reclaimed this older readerly temperament. The modern sentimental subject emerges from their creative, critical investments. Chapter one explores sentimentalism and affect theory for the different tools they offer this subject. The modern sentimental subject grasps sentimental political storytelling’s power to supply relief, whether financial or social. A quick study, she wields affective agency with skill. This agency does not necessarily grant her the comfort of self-assuredness, nor lead to self-awareness of the kind sentimental reflection imparts. Chapter two applies these distinctions to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, reading its protagonist’s submission as a triumphant move to self-actualize—a brave choice to respond to sentimental feeling. Chapter three analyzes the entwined relation between the emotional and the economic by exploring Claude McKay’s allusion to the Caribbean coffee crisis of the 1830s in Banana Bottom. By privileging Stoic principles in his protagonist’s journey towards self-mastery, McKay shows how introspection assures her voyage into community. Chapter four discusses Marilynne Robinson’s novels in relation to her essays. By imagining what it might mean to be a Good Samaritan or embrace a Prodigal Son, her writing works to replace a broken parable of American exceptionalism. Through visionary tableau, Robinson offers a more expansive Christian ethic many in her audience find rousing, especially as an alternative to evangelical conservativism. Share
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