As an English student, evaluating the creative works of others is what I spend my time doing. My classmates and I can approach this in a plethora of different contexts: historical, political, through a gendered lens, and more. We can also broach a work in its overall form (the text at large), or choose to look at a portion of it and do a “close reading.”
Of course I enjoy each of these avenues, because they reveal so much information I wouldn’t have known otherwise. However, emotions count too; they are the reason I became an English major.
Analyzing a work on the basis of where and when it is written is very helpful, but ignores some aspects of what the text can do. A text moves, a text inspires, a text makes you feel in your darkest hour. If a text fails to do this, is it successful?
The American Gothic writers presented a division between logic and emotion, so this debate is nothing new. Living in a nation prioritizing science, reason, and classification, their works played to the human psyche and tested the boundaries of the American reader; how far could audiences be pushed?
Affect theory acknowledges this type of reading, because it recognizes emotion as the initial way we respond to a work, and supports the belief that how we emotionally respond to a text reveals something about our inner selves.
Looking to emotion also allows us to connect with the artist and their work in a non-contrived way. When looking to a writer, we typically draw up a portrait of them and keep it in mind when viewing their work: their gender, race, nationality, and sexuality all become points of focus, and become “symbols” that we aim to find embedded within their works.
But is this the right way to read? By doing so in this way, we are essentially cherry-picking the features we wish to see, and ignoring or undervaluing those not aligning with the portrait of the artist. At the end of the day, the writer is a human individual, and I like to believe we are not merely the sum of all our parts, but are something more.
Claude McKay, an African-American writer from Harlem during the 1920s, makes reference to this expectation. He explained how he was expected to read his poetry while wearing a dress suit out of respect for the image the public desired of him. Instead, he maintained that he “abhorred that damnable uniform” and that “poets and novelists should let good actors perform for them.” I feel that this is exactly what we do when ignoring the emotion of a work of art — putting the artist on a stage rather than looking to ourselves and our own interpretation of the text.
This all isn’t to say that I desire no critical thinking beyond what I can feel. It is valuable to know an artist’s personal politics, and what sort of a family upbringing they had, because their experiences and ideology do influence their work and their creative process.
However, writers read the books they do out of emotional enjoyment, so we should make sure to remember to do the same, and not make idols of the artists we adore.
