Overview

Organizing Relation investigates how attachment theory can shift major conversations in literary criticism about connection, personhood, and aesthetic experience. Drawing on the author's experience along with extensive scholarly research into attachment theory, somatic and relational healing, and childhood development, the book delineates the emergence of subjectivity from micro-episodes of attuned connection and the arising of attachment trauma in the absence of adequate experiences of attunement. The emergent understanding of intermittent passages in which embodied presence self-organizes in response to relational episodes prompts a reorganization of how literary studies approaches subjectivity, language, and the body. Organizing Relation pursues that reorganization through a portfolio of readings in nineteenth-century American literature, in which relational turbulence provokes different experiences of power and dependency, opening up passages of dissociated chaos and of brilliant, brief connected life.

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9780197805596

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Theo Davis is Professor and Chair of English at Northeastern, where she teaches 19th-century American literature and critical theory. She is the author of Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson & Whitman and Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century.

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