Emotional Geographies: Gender, Affect, and Urban Space in Post-1945 Translocal Literary and Visual Texts
Edited volumea
Editors:
- Ágnes Györke, Senior Lecturer, University of Debrecen, Department of British Studies
- Imola Bülgözdi, Senior Lecturer, University of Debrecen, North American Department
Affect studies has emerged as one of the most productive fields of analysis since the turn of the 21st century. Following in the footsteps of Teresa Brennan and Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, for instance, a number of scholars have explored the function of affect and emotion in literature, culture and social life. Relying on psychoanalytical as well as social theories, the “affective turn” has contributed to cultural studies in many ways: books focusing on gender, emotional politics, transnationalism, the moving image, political engagement and leadership theories from the perspective of emotion, empathy and affect were published, among many other studies that investigate the role of emotion in social life.
Few critics, however, have investigated the intersections of emotion and location, particularly, urban space, in literary and visual texts. Henri Lefebvre has famously claimed that space expresses social relations, but does it also express emotional geographies? Can we talk about an urban sensitivity, as Heiko Schmid assumes, which provides a more sophisticated framework for city studies than Georg Simmel’s famous notion of the blasé attitude, for instance? Can we read the moving image as a map that connects affects and space?
Our volume aims to explore these issues: we invite papers that investigate the affective dimensions of space in various post-1945 cultural contexts. We are particularly interested in comparative and cross-geographical analyses and encourage contributors to focus on the emotional geographies of iconic cities.
Contributors are invited to explore one of the following themes:
- East-Central Europe as textual and spatial boundary
- Translocal empathy
- The place of trauma and aggression
- Urban geographies of sexuality
- Desire, utopia and the city
- Emotional border crossings
- Crime, guilt and the city
- Emotional geography of eating practices
- Obsession, addiction and city life
- Nostalgia and urban memory
- Marginalisation, exclusion and the city
- Proposals are welcomed for papers within the field of literature, film, music, and the visual arts. Abstracts of no more than 500 words are due by January 30, 2016; notification of selection will be made by February 15, 2016. Final papers of 7000-8000 words are due by May 30, 2016. Please send the abstract and your CV of no more than 3 pages to gyorke.agnes@arts.unideb.hu and bulgozdi.imola@arts.unideb.hu.
For more information about the Gender, Translocality and the City Research Group, please click here.
This work is supported by the University of Debrecen (RH/751/2015).