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"John Brenkman's book addresses fundamental questions in modern aesthetics by folding the recent "affective turn" in critical theory back toward the "linguistic turn," against which it is usually opposed. His aim is to re-ground affect theory on the reflections of major modern philosophers (particularly Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze) about sensation, feeling, emotion, mood, passion, and attunement, and to test those reflections through specific poetic works. Affect, Brenkman argues, can be studied with some precision in poetry because it resides there not in speaking about feelings but in the very speaking and way of speaking. Brenkman confronts Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze with an intentionally heterogeneous set of authors and artists, including Pinter and Poe, Baudelaire and Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, Tino Sehgal and Rineke Dijkstra, Francis Bacon, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jorie Graham. The book ultimately has much to tell us about the vocation of criticism. Criticism, Brenkman, is incapable of systematicity but must instead be attuned to the singularity and plurality of literary and artistic creations. For criticism today, "What is art?" is a less pressing question than "What does this work do?" and "What do these works do?""--
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