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1st out of 17 books
—
6 voters
Ordinary Affects
Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes...more
Paperback, 129 pages
Published
September 20th 2007
by Duke University Press Books
(first published August 30th 2007)
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It is highly unlikely to put Ordinary Affects down after you have started reading it, not only because it is a post-modernist and literary account rather than a book serving for pure ethnographic purposes – or not, as Kathleen Stewart would say – but also because it is a work where you need to dig deeper between the lines and look up carefully for the agent of the work that the book itself does not know that it possesses or how to take it into action.
Stewart claims clearly from the start of her...more
Stewart claims clearly from the start of her...more
While Stewart's book appears slight and impressionistic, its exquisitely crafted vignettes display an incredibly sophisticated gift for uncovering the significance of the ordinary, everyday lives of people in contemporary America. From this start, this book announces itself as decidedly different from standard ethnographies: Stewart writes in the third person, does not perform the narrow but deep analysis so common to academic studies, and refuses to ground her observations within the common ide...more
A fascinating study of the everyday, but a study which is far removed from that of for instance de Certeau. Instead, Stewart argues that the ordinary affects we all undergo every day are the primary ways we engage with the world. An autobiography written in third person, the style is dreamy and associative, just like the ordinariness of every day.
A wonderful book. If you love cultural poetics, I recommend Mick Taussig's work and in the field of Composition/Rhetoric, Geoffrey Sirc's _Composition as a Happening_. Also Ross Chamber's lovely book, Loiterature. These authors saved "Academic Writing" from being an oxymoron for me.
I didn't find the book interesting perhaps because I'm not an American?
Holy smokes it's like she crawled out from the inside of my brain with a pen. I fucking love this book.
I find myself amazed that she's able to write so clearly about, among other things, those very subtle goings on between people that go by in an instant yet leave one troubled. Occasionally the way she tries to attend to complexity with an affect theorist's diction sounds like nonsense.
I took several undergrad classes with Dr. Stewart and her ability to write with cultural metaphors is simply amazing! A unique voice in the academic arena.
This is an amazing collection of short vignettes about the politics of public feeling and the intense emotional saturation of ordinary moments.
social theory for poets
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