ACLA Online Panel: Case Studies in Feeling: Toward New Theories of Emotion Across Media (ACLA VIRTUAL 2027 Annual Meeting on May 15 & 16, 2027)
Online
Organization: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
Event: ACLA VIRTUAL 2027 Annual Meeting on May 15 & 16, 2027
Emotions continue to attract critical attention across disciplines. Scholars have noted the growing prominence of emotion in media, politics, and internet culture, which some describe as an “emotionalization” of social life (Yanacek 2026). Over the past three decades, emotion theory has provided a multidisciplinary lens for understanding literary and cultural texts, phenomena, and movements. Brian Massumi's distinction holds that emotion is socially coded and contingent on language, whereas affect is a pre-linguistic, asignifying intensity that exceeds discourse's capacity to fully capture it (1995). Sara Ahmed reframes emotion as social and relational rather than private, arguing that emotions “stick” to bodies and objects through repeated circulation, accumulating or losing affective value in the process (2004). Historians such as Barbara Rosenwein instead approach emotion diachronically, investigating the sanctioned “emotional communities” of different historical periods and how their norms of feeling and expression changed over time (2006). These frameworks are not fully reconcilable. For example, Massumi’s model of pre-personal intensity has been challenged by critics such as Ruth Leys (2011), who question whether a truly pre-social affect is theoretically or empirically defensible. This tension among circulation, historicization, and the limit of pre-linguistic feeling remains a live and generative debate in the field.
Game studies extend this inquiry into interactive media, asking scholars to account for procedure, system, and player agency alongside representation when studying emotion in play and design. Meanwhile, recent advances in facial recognition and artificial intelligence have pushed machines “from analytical processors to emotionally perceptive entities,” if not to emotional entities themselves (Slimani 2026). These approaches resist treating emotion as ahistorical, private, or apolitical. Studying feeling as a legitimate, theorizable object reveals how power operates through affect, opens texts to modes of engagement beyond decoding, and invites us to reconsider the boundaries of the human, including where those boundaries fall in relation to nonhuman and machine forms of feeling.
This panel invites papers that develop, test, or complicate existing theories of affect and emotion through close case studies, rather than merely applying them. We welcome submissions on any literary or cultural form, including but not limited to novels, poetry, drama, film, and video games, from any historical period and geographical region. This panel will be held online.
Please go to https://www.acla.org/seminars, log into your ACLA account, find the panel, and submit your paper proposal by clicking the submit button.
Haihong Yang