The theme of ‘unfeeling’ promised an urgent exploration of what it is to be human after the enforced separation, dislocation, and artificially recreated forms of social interaction that were prevalent during the pandemic and continue to be so. It is almost that we have discovered how to be posthuman. Unfeeling, we suggest, dislocates the internal subjective experience and the external expression thereof in a culturally legible manner. This perhaps underlines the contingent and culturally motivated way in which we experience, read, and express ‘feelings’ intersubjectively. ‘Feeling otherwise’ is an important and empowering marker of difference and agency which threads through our articles, creative writing, and reviews (Yao 12). This standpoint can operate to interrogate and interpret (white) cultural and political hegemony with its insistence on the social legibility and necessity for ‘appropriate’ emotions and responses. In this issue, our writers explore how unfeeling can engender a defence mechanism; it offers to promote healing by setting aside hurt feelings and refusing to continue to incorporate or experience them; it creates a refusal to be complicit with this socio normative control.
Editorial Introduction
Unfeeling
- Sarah Bethany Edwards
- Sarah Chambre
- William Burns
- Damian Walsh
- Daniel Lewis
- Miriam Helmers
Volume 14 • Issue 1 • 2022 • Unfeeling
Academic articles
I Feel, Therefore I Am: Trauma, Memory, and Posthuman Liberation in Blade Runner (1982) and WestWorld (2016)
- Dylan Phelan
Volume 14 • Issue 1 • 2022 • Unfeeling
To Feel or Not to Feel: Dissociative Feminism and Modalities of Unfeeling in 21st-Century Literary Fiction
- Cleo Miki
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Modernist Mapping and Post-postmodern Feeling: The Rhizomatic Framework of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
- George Kowalik
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T. S. Eliot: Close Reading, and the Question of Feeling
- Rowena Gutsell
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Unfeeling, politics and race in the Balkans in the 1930s: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
- Nicola Dimitriou
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Unfeeling, Unflinching, and ‘Superbly Uncuddly’: Muriel Spark’s “The Desegregation of Art”
- Joshua Lok
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Vegetal Affect: Disruptive Unfeeling in the Face of Gender Oppression in Han Kang's The Vegetarian
- Emily Jane Cluett
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Book reviews
'I didn't bring my heart with me' : Unfeeling as a mode of resistance in Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives.
- Alisha Mathers
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"Here we go into the grey": Moses Sumney's Song Writing of opacity in grae (2020).
- Anna De Vivo
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Automation and Diminutions in Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings
- Loma Sylvana Jones
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‘Narcolepsy in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- Nicholas Griffin
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‘Sentimental Cultures, Political Fantasy, and Unfeeling’
- Paula Barba Guerrero
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Die, cry, hate: the unfeeling of the unwilling Black surrogate mother in Luster and Such a Fun Age
- Amal Abdi
Volume 14 • Issue 1 • 2022 • Unfeeling