Reviews for Deleuze and American Literature: Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison and McCarthy

The average rating for Deleuze and American Literature: Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison and McCarthy based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-08 00:00:00 Dianna Allen This is just brilliant for those who wish to do Deleuzian literary practice. Bourassa employs Deleuze's notion of (the primacy of) virtuality and its sister concepts (affectivity, the non-human, force, desire, exteriority, singularity, etc.) on the one hand and the concepts that rest on specific determinations or particular actualizations of the realm of the virtual (the plane of consistency according to Deleuze) into the realm of the actual (the plane of organization) on the other. Bourassa argues that what marks the novel form (after the 18th century in American literature) is not so much a concern with the human (emotions, feelings, experiences, individuality, psychology, etc.) than it is the movement beyond the actual into the realm of the non-human (what I may call virtualization). This is not to do away with the real since the virtual, although non-existent, is very real but just waiting behind the threshold to be manifested in various ways in our lives. Bourassa's analyses of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are so different and inspiring in defining an aesthetics of affectivity.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-07 00:00:00 John Hearon Very engaging and inspiring work on the affective work of literature and the nonhuman modalities in what Bourassa calls the human/language/literature triumvirate. Theory-heavy but very worthwhile.