ABSTRACT
The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed not only an “affective turn” in contemporary fiction but also an “affective turn” in literary criticism. In the current scholarship of emotion studies, critics mainly focus on the mimetic aspects of emotion from a cognitive perspective while neglecting its anti-mimetic aspects. This chapter argues that not all stories are created by the normal and usual emotions. Instead, there exist so-called unnatural emotions in contemporary avant-garde and anti-mimetic narratives, which are physically, logically, or humanly impossible. Through presenting unnatural emotions, contemporary avant-garde narratives not only foreground the fictionality of unnatural narratives but also generate defamiliarizing effects. Taking Ian McEwan’s “Dead as They Come” as an example, this chapter proposes a synthetic approach to unnatural emotions by combining both naturalizing reading strategies and unnaturalizing reading strategies, so as to make the text readable without losing its unnaturalness.
