Formal Innovation and Affect

The relation between formal innovation in works of literature and readers’ affective responses has not been the subject of wide discussion. Modernism, as Julie Taylor notes in her introduction to the collection Modernism and Affect, has often been characterised as ‘cold, hard and cerebral’ in contrast to the Victorian penchant for sentiment that it was challenging (2). Laura Frost, therefore, is being uncontroversial when she refers to the ‘daunting, onerous, and demanding reading practices’ required to wrest pleasure from modernist texts, and asserts that ‘modernism's signature formal rhetorics, including irony, fragmentation, indirection, and allusiveness, are a parallel means of promoting a particularly knotty, arduous reading effect’ (The Problem with Pleasure, 3). Many modernist writers themselves emphasised their control of emotion, T. S. Eliot only being the most prominent. Moreover, the influential attack on the so-called ‘affective fallacy’ by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley meant that the practitioners of New Criticism, who found in modernist texts the ideal material for their analyses, were wary of talking about emotional response (‘The Affective Fallacy’). (Emotional response was important for I. A. Richards, but this aspect of his approach to literary works was seldom followed up.) And it's commonly assumed that the reader faced with sentences that require unusual effort, language that fails to conform to its own norms, and narratives that defy generic expectations is too busy carrying out the necessary intellectual deciphering to experience an emotional reaction to the text. By contrast with famously unsentimental modernist writing, the argument goes, the realist techniques developed by Victorian novelists (and their counterparts in other linguistic traditions), and carried into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by numerous novelists, are what can provide readers with finely-drawn characters whose narrated experiences arouse strong empathetic responses.

Among philosophers concerned with literature and affect, few treat questions of form at any length, though one exception is Jenefer Robinson, who, in Deeper than Reason, argues that literary form acts as a ‘coping device’, allowing the reader to deal with painful emotion in a way that produces pleasure.