Affect and Emotion in World Literature (Panel / In-Person) (PAMLA)
Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
Organization: (PAMLA)
Event: PAMLA
Abstract
This session invites papers exploring the role of affect and emotion in contemporary world literature. Recent developments in affect theory—particularly the work of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant—have emphasized how emotions circulate across individuals, communities, and cultural contexts. Literary texts offer a powerful site for examining how affect shapes narratives of identity, belonging, and social transformation within global and transnational frameworks.
Across genres including poetry, fiction, memoir, and hybrid forms, contemporary writers increasingly explore how emotions such as grief, nostalgia, anger, and intimacy intersect with migration, diaspora, race, gender, and cultural memory. This session welcomes papers that examine how literature represents affective experience across national and linguistic boundaries. Possible topics include affect and diaspora, emotional memory, collective feeling, affective politics, and the relationship between literary form and the circulation of feeling in global literary contexts.
Description
This session invites papers examining the role of affect and emotion in contemporary world literature. Recent developments in affect theory have drawn attention to how emotions circulate across individuals, communities, and social structures. Rather than treating emotions as purely private experiences, affect theory highlights how feelings shape collective identities, political life, and cultural narratives. Literature provides a particularly rich site for examining these affective dynamics, as literary texts often capture how emotions structure experiences of belonging, displacement, attachment, and loss.
In the context of world literature, affect becomes a crucial lens for understanding how emotions travel across cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries. Contemporary writers working across diverse literary traditions frequently engage themes of migration, diaspora, cultural memory, and transnational identity. Emotions such as nostalgia, grief, longing, anger, and resilience often emerge as key structures through which writers represent the complexities of global mobility and cultural encounter.
Across genres—including poetry, fiction, memoir, and hybrid literary forms—authors increasingly experiment with narrative form, multilingual expression, and fragmented storytelling to represent the affective dimensions of transnational experience. Literary form itself often participates in the representation of affect through narrative disruption, shifting perspectives, and stylistic experimentation that evoke the circulation and intensity of feeling.
This session welcomes papers that engage affect theory in the analysis of contemporary literary texts within global or transnational contexts. Possible topics include affect and diaspora, emotional memory, collective feeling, affective politics, transnational identity, and the relationship between literary form and emotional experience. By bringing together diverse approaches to affect in world literature, this panel aims to explore how contemporary writing reveals the emotional structures that shape cultural belonging, global mobility, and literary expression in the twenty-first century.
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20028
Eunsun Jun