Cause and Affect

              People often discount the power of affect.  The way we think, the way we feel, all this is defined by affect.  We describe feelings as emotions, and put names to these emotions.  "I feel happy, sad, angry, stressed, etc".  But these emotions are merely the way that we try to describe the reactions we have by the way that something affects us.  For example, you may see a certain movie and a scene in that movie affects you in a certain way.  You feel it, and in an attempt to understand this affect you are feeling, you attach a name, an emotion to that affect.  Although this physical response happens to each of us, each day, for a long time in writing studies there was little importance placed on affect, more important was the meaning of something.  

             The “affective turn” a phrase coined by Patricia Clough in the book The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social occurred during the mid 1990s.  At this time people in writing studies began to look at the way things affect us and to give value to this affect in its own right, regardless of meaning.  The way that words sound to us when read aloud, the affect a certain scene in a movie can have on us, all these things have some value regardless of the meaning that may or may not be attached to them.