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Sentimental aesthetics have come to vex contemporary literature. The relation between feeling and acting is increasingly contested, and emotional entanglements in the lives of others often seem suspect. Literary criticism, meanwhile, wrestles with its own purpose when confronting representations of vulnerability, inequity, and injustice.
David James explores what happens when writers’ affective ambitions coincide with criticism’s hunger for social consequence. He considers caregiving activists, illness memoirists, and writers of poverty and migration who are not simply reclaiming sentimental forms but also foregrounding their aesthetic, ethical, and political potency. These works of “sentimental activism” solicit readers’ emotional engagement while also testing models for political change in the historical and cultural specificity of the experiences they depict. They ask readers to recognize their positions of privilege, the perils of universalism, and the thresholds of compassion.
James brings a surprising variety of genres into conversation, including fiction by Sally Rooney, Zadie Smith, Douglas Stuart, and Valeria Luiselli alongside works of pathography, medical advocacy, and humanitarian protest by Anne Boyer, Havi Carel, Josie George, Rebecca Loncraine, Rachel Clarke, Christie Watson, and Tima Kurdi. Reluctant to leave readers dwelling in pathos alone, these writers aspire to move us yet also move us to action. Sentimental Activism shows how this aspiration continues to shape how writers and critics alike fathom the transformative work literature might perform.
— Christina Lupton, Bewley Chair of English, Rutgers University
This book is a wonder. In David James’s imagination, the sentimental becomes one avenue for being pressed on by the daunting relations and responsibilities of being in the world. To have one’s heart, when one is reading, feel like it is being broken—that ushers a potentiality neither small nor sure.
— Kevin Quashie, Brown University
In Sentimental Activism, David James takes on the problem of pathos, bringing his considerable skill in close reading to an original and surprising archive. He illuminates the relationship between representation and feeling while demonstrating the potential of sentimentality as a mode of ethical and political engagement. James’s approach to books that knowingly seek to move readers models how to reorient literary criticism from suspicion to hospitality. This book will provoke renewed consideration of sentimentality’s ongoing appeal and novel uses. Timely and transformative to the point of urgency.
— Leigh Gilmore, author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony
With precision, panache, and a whole lot of heart, David James rescues pathos from critics attuned to polemic and incrimination. Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and daringly provocative, Sentimental Activism changes what we think about how we read and how we feel. From one of our most sophisticated literary critics, a bold rethinking of what literature can and cannot do to address the multiplying crises of our time.
— Yogita Goyal, author of Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery
List of Figures
Introduction: Solicitation’s Reprieve
1. The Poignancy of Patients
2. Minor Forms of Reparative Magic
3. Poverty Fiction and the Dialectics of Social Emotion
4. Listening to the Refugee
Epilogue: The Hunger for Consequentiality
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index