Metodo

International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Series | Book | Chapter

224899

The body in wonder

affective suspension and medieval queer futurity

Wan-Chuan Kao

pp. 25-43

Abstract

This chapter argues that Chaucer in The Franklin's Tale deploys wonder as an affective script that enfolds shame and creates its own reality. As a complex affective phenomenon that is somatic and cognitive, suspensive and mobile, stupefying and animating, wonder provides a strategic alternative to paradigms of shame or hope in reading premodern queer subject formation and futurity. Wonder as a queer temporal strategy suspends the present but also gestures toward an inscrutable future that is neither anti-relational nor utopic. Premodern queerness, in this instance, resides in the subject's non-coincidence with declensions of the first, second, and third person. That is, the queer occupies the position of the fourth-person singular: the space of maximum attention and singular vitality that counters the disciplinary regime of marriage.

Publication details

Published in:

Ahern Stephen (2019) Affect theory and literary critical practice: a feel for the text. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Pages: 25-43

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_2

Full citation:

Kao Wan-Chuan (2019) „The body in wonder: affective suspension and medieval queer futurity“, In: S. Ahern (ed.), Affect theory and literary critical practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 25–43.