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American Graphic
Loren Glass and Kate Marshall, Editors
Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee
American Graphic
Disgust and Data
in Contemporary Literature
Rebecca B. Clark
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec-
tronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Acknowledgments vii
2 The Ethnographic 55
Notes 231
Bibliography 271
Index 285
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
gwei Huang, Yui Hashimoto, Yana Stainova, Laura McTighe, Derek Woods,
and Whitney Barlow Robles. I’m also grateful for the equally incomparable
Dolly, Anna Childs, who knows more vocationally about the graphic than I
ever will, Madi Gamble, and Brandon Smith.
Thank you to Post*45 series editors Kate Marshall and Loren Glass and to
Erica Wetter and Caroline McKusick at Stanford University Press for being
so refreshingly efficient, enthusiastic, and fun to work with. I am also exceed-
ingly grateful to the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers, who were fast, thor-
ough, generous, and kind enough to say they laughed at some of my jokes.
Thanks, too, to Jennifer Gordon, copyeditor extraordinaire.
Finally, most importantly, thank you to my parents, Laurie Bennett and
Rachel Clark, and to my Aunt Susan. I also acknowledge Sam Clark, my
brother dearest.
American Graphic
This page intentionally left blank
I N TRO D U C T I O N
The Graphic and the Graph-ick
graphic, adj.
1. a. of or relating to the pictorial arts
c. of or relating to the art of printing
2. formed by writing, drawing, or engraving
3. a. vividly or plainly shown or described // a graphic sex scene
b. using offensive or obscene words: including swear words
c. marked by clear lifelike or vividly realistic description
4. of, relating to, or represented by a graph
graphic, n.
2. a. a graphic representation (such as a picture, map, or graph) used
especially for illustration
b. a pictorial image displayed on a computer screen
c. graphics plural in form but singular or plural in construction: the art or
science of drawing a representation of an object on a two-dimensional
surface according to mathematical rules of projection
4. a printed message superimposed on a television picture1
1
2 Introduction
the diagrammatically abstract? When flesh meets data? These literary, visual,
and performance works are at once viscerally gross and coolly clinical. In
them, readers are forced into the affective bind of a mode of engagement
that is simultaneously empathic and classificatory, demanding identification
and, at the same time, denying it. I posit that we see a marked turn in con-
temporary American literature away from the well-t heorized gross aesthetic
of the grotesque towards the ambivalent feeling of this “double graphic”—
simultaneously disgusting and disinterested. I argue that this graphic turn in-
dexes a newly prominent way of approaching the desire to know other people.
It reveals the unseemliness of a lust, in our contemporary culture of informa-
tion, for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies, and feelings, of others.
Toggling between emotional saturation and affective evacuation, the
double graphic creates a crisis within the politics of affect and identification.
As the sentimental tradition weeps and keens and flays its way into the era
of database aesthetics and information overload, the double graphic reworks
how sympathy operates in texts that do upsetting things with bodies. It forces
us to face how closely and discomfitingly yoked together disgust and data—
identification with and identification of the other—have become in our in-
creasingly graph-ick world.
Graphic Affect
“Affect” has been a tasty term du jour in literary studies for more than a few
days now. There are now not only theories of affect, but theories of theories of
affect. Affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, as they swap or share places,
have now been defined in a panoply of ways, with more or less precision, often
wafting ever atmospherically higher on gusts of increasingly mixed metaphor,
by esteemed thinkers across multiple fields.
One of the contributions to the field of affect studies that is the most
useful for this book is Sianne Ngai’s expansion, begun in her germinal work
Ugly Feelings, of the category of “aesthetic emotions . . . or feelings unique to
our encounters with artworks.”2 Anchoring affect in artworks, too, Eugenie
Brinkema argues in The Forms of the Affects that
it is only because one must read for it that affect has any force at all. The inten-
sity of that force derives from the textual specificity and particularity made
available uniquely through reading, the vitality of all that is not known in
4 Introduction
advance of close reading, the surprising enchantments of the new that are
not uncovered by interpretation but produced and brought into being as its
activity.3
The feelings associated with and complicated by the double graphic are
summoned by the specifics of the texts I closely read in the chapters that
follow. While one of the most generative and frustrating aspects of the double
graphic is the way in which it forces the question of how it is we (can) read
(for) affect at all, I follow Ngai and Brinkema in averring that actively read for
it must be.
In literary studies, the turn to affect is generally considered an effort to
recenter the corporeal in discussions of literary texts and their effects, while at
the same time decentering the private individual as the privileged site of feel-
ing and emotion. The affective turn has often dismissed the word “emotion”
itself as inadequate for reorienting discussions of feeling away from some
mythic self-contained subject out of whom feelings exclusively spring and in
whom they proprietarily reside.4
Central, then, to theories of affect (and theories about those theories) is
the question of the relationship between affect, the body, and particular indi-
viduated bodies. For many, affect is of and about the body, but it neither lives
within nor emerges sui generis from it. Affect is about “impersonal intensi-
ties,”5 potentiality, and what bodies can or might do—“a body’s capacity to
affect and to be affected.”6 For a rarer few, affect not only fully sheds the sub-
ject but completely dissociates from the body or bodies altogether. Brinkema
regards “any individual affect as a self-folding exteriority that manifests in, as,
and with textual form.”7 I don’t quite go as far as her on that count. It is to the
question of the body and bodies, rather than debates about the separation be-
tween affect and emotion,8 that my concept of the double graphic might have
the most to contribute. In many ways, the crux of the affective discomfort of
doubly graphic moments is that they explicitly and invasively display vulner-
able characters as both the abstracted body—often through the figures of the
silhouette, the sex doll, and the data point—and as intimately particular fleshy
bodies at the same time.
This book enters into this conversation with the affect theorists Eve Sedg-
wick, Sara Ahmed, and Eugenie Brinkema. That these scholars aren’t always
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*****
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*****
*****
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