There’s something ultramodern about the book and the character Dora. She’s fashionable. There’s not a hint of fashion in Ordinary Affects. There is sex and complicated networks of desire in Freud’s Vienna. In Stewart and Shelton sex is invisible. There is witty conversation, eating disorders, and what seems to be a world rehearsing for the arrival of Facebook coexisting with rich Viennese desserts and reticules. Dreams might as well be YouTube videos. But it’s all prior to 1905 in an old European capital and its environs without any urban descriptions or modern technologies peeking through. If Freud had chosen any individual from the web surrounding Dora and told their story, their trajectory would have been almost identical with minor variations. Stewart calls this ordinary affects; Shelton, the mark of the spade. Lesy’s portrait of rural Wisconsin at the turn of the 20th century sets a very different tone for what is ordinary in its record of violence and weirdness. It is as if the ground itself is haunted or a subterranean electrical grid has gone awry. Compare and contrast Shelton and Stewart’s conceptualization of social psychology with strategic uses of Freud and Lesy.
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|