Spaces and Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

Spaces of Feeling features close readings of works by Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, Ralph Ellison, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens. Figlerowicz points out that these poets and novelists often place their protagonists in domestic spaces – such as bedrooms, living rooms, and basements – in which their cognitive dependence on other characters inhabiting these spaces becomes clear. Figlerowicz highlights the diversity of aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts in which these affective dependencies become central to these authors’ representations of selfhood. By setting these novels and poems in conversation with the work of contemporary theorists, she illuminates pressing and unanswered questions about subjectivity.