How Does It Feel To Be at University. Affect in Contemporary North American Campus Fiction
How Does It Feel To Be at University. Affect in Contemporary North American Campus Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the role of affect in academic life, using as case studies three North American campus novelsnarrated from undergraduate and graduate students’ perspectives. While the case studies – Sarah Henstra’s TheRed Word (2018), Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (2020), and Juliet Lapidos’s Talent (2019) – include humorouselements, they tend to foreground the student-protagonists’ emotional responses to their precarious position in thecompetitive and hierarchical world of academia. In each novel, the emotional impact of academic life is additionallycomplicated by the students’ gender, class, race, and/or sexuality. Arguably, out of the many affects young peopleexperience every day, two play a special role in academia: interest and shame. Referring to the affect theories of SilvanS. Tomkins (2008), Paul J. Silvia (2005, 2008), Pierre Bourdieu ([1994] 1998), and Ann Cvetkovich (2012), thispaper attempts to show how writers tell emotionally charged stories about campus life, structured by the interplayof interest and shame.

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