ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an incident that may be familiar to those who teach in departments of literature. The work of curiosity fills our lives with bits and pieces of information that can become self-defining and self-redefining, as our interests tug us along to new attractions, new enthusiasms, new absorptions. The paranoiac tendencies that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes have perhaps softened somewhat in the years since this observation, but a free-floating mistrust still hovers over literary and cultural criticism, one that exists in parallel, often dismissive relation to the curiosity of less jaded readers. Attachments are constructed out of our multiple relations to the world, those various connections that constitute our psychic and material lives. The promise of sociality is why it is not a stretch for students to identify in early US literature a set of affective dynamics that speak to their contemporary moment. It is why their desire for such connections is understandable, practical, and perhaps even necessary.
