ABSTRACT
Much of contemporary affect theory has conceptualized affect’s workings as asymbolic or in excess of language. This chapter challenges these oppositions by proposing a syncretic model that allows us to investigate the multifaceted productivity of affects in the literary communication circuit. Drawing on a dialogue between (in part diverging) notions of worlding and worldmaking in contemporary affect and narrative theory along with Bruno Latour’s proposals for intertwining ontology and rhetoric, the model conceptualizes both composition and reading as multidimensional, processual assemblages of entangled affects and tropes, sensations and cultural memories. The chapter details these ideas in a reading of Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen (Elbow; 2017), with a particular focus on the novel’s literary deployments of hate speech, on fictionality as a reassembly of piecemeal actuality, and the distribution of nonsovereign agency in the loops of literary worldmaking. The chapter is framed with a discussion of the productivity of such literary worldmaking – as a reconfiguration of the sensible in Jacques Rancière’s sense – within a broader public sphere conceptualized as a realm of affective circulations.
