The Affective turn was an important movement in writing studies. It made people remember the pleasure that can be gained from writing and reading. For so long the focus had been purely on the “meaning” of what was being written, anything beyond that was superfluous. The affective turn wasn’t something necessarily new, but a return to that pleasure found in the sound of words and in the way a certain phrase or scene “strikes a chord” with us. Jenny Edbauer, in her article Big Time Sensuality states that it is “important for us to recognize the pleasures that already exist for our students and all textual users. More specifically, we should begin to investigate how things matter to textual users, and what that process means for a literacy pedagogy”(Edbauer 25). The meaning behind a text isn’t the only thing that makes it significant for a reader. In fact, in my own reading, if there is no pleasure, if the phrasing is monotonous to read or there is no emotional attachment to a given piece, I have little motivation to keep reading, even if the “meaning” of the piece is important.
In many respects the importance we place on anything ties
back to the way that that thing affects us. For example, most of the most well remembered
movies are remembered because they impacted us, affected us in a unique,
physical as well as emotional way. Edbauer
mentions the movie Fight Club, with
it’s dramatic ending, quoting the online journal Slate saying that the “most thrilling thing about Fight Club isn’t
what it says but how [...] Fincher pu11[s] you into its narrator’s head and
simulate [s] his adrenaline rushes”(Edbauer 27). The same could be said for
other movies, such as Sixth Sense. Watching that movie and realizing at the end
that the main character, who thought he was alive this whole time is actually
dead hit me, in a very physical way. Something hard to describe, but intense and
unique. We try to capture these affects
by attaching them to emotions, but somehow words fall short in expressing how
exactly it affected us. Lewis Briggs, in
his article The Affective Turn,
quoted David Sylvester who stated that “art affects one in different parts of
one’s body. For example, sometimes in the solar plexus or the pit of one’s
stomach, sometimes in the shoulder blades […] or one may get a feeling of
levitation – an experience I particularly associate with Matisse”(Briggs).
This
focus on the affect doesn’t discount the “meaning” of a given work, but it
shows that meaning is not the only important factor, and affect can in fact
enhance the meaning that a reader can find in a text, movie, or any other
medium. Many writers can discuss
meaning, but the few writers, artists, and directors that we really remember
are the ones that affected us.
Works Cited
Briggs, Lewis. The Biennial
Blog. Liverpool Biennial. n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2012
Edbauer Jenny. “Big Time
Sensuality: Affective Literacies and Texts That Matter.”
Composition
Forum 13.1 (2002) 23-37. Print.
