Spiteful Literature: An Affective Theory of Precarity

This project investigates fictional narratives by Indigenous peoples and inhabitants of the US Mountain South. As a Carlsberg Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, I will analyze the representations and uses of spite in literary texts, and I will construct a theory of spite as an affective literary device in US literature.
The project sheds light on the current political climate in the US by arguing that the literary representations resonate with ongoing real social and cultural concerns, such as the spitefulness of Trump-voters, disenfranchisement of poor communities, and ongoing dispossession and colonisation of Native/Indigenous peoples, as well as these groups' responses to these processes. Thus, the project will challenge received notions of social mobility inherent in the American Creed and shed light on a contemporary (literary and sociopolitical) tendency towards desperate, but reasonable, spiteful (self)separatism.
The investigation will be carried out by 1) exploring the affective and cultural contexts of the spiteful narratives, 2) by examining fictional representations of precarious lives and actors/characters as desperate and spiteful, and 3) by analysing the narrative and aesthetic devices that produce precarious feelings.