Chan Wai Charles Wong

Charles holds a BA in English from the University of London and a MA in English Studies
from Freie Universität Berlin. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU
Erlangen-Nürnberg, he had doctoral proposals accepted at the University of York and at
Freie Universität Berlin, where he was also awarded the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium.

Project: Affective Alienation: The Aesthetics of [Un]sentimentality in Contemporary Anglophone Fictions

This project looks at [un]sentimentality and its range of associated expressions – apathy, ambivalence, passivity, vagrancy – in contemporary Anglophone fiction, arguing that an aesthetics revitalizing a Brechtian approach to art and politics can be located through a deliberate distancing from affect. Tracing affective alienation in recent short stories by Colin Barrett and Ottessa Moshfegh and recent novels by Daisy Hildyard, Eimear McBride, Sarah Bernstein and Teju Cole, the project posits that literary [un]sentimentality is ultimately not an absence of affect, but the strategic deployment of ‚flat‘, ‚minor‘, and ‚uneven‘ affects as effects. Doing so allows these fictions to reflect an understanding of disaffection as epitomizing a contemporary human experience shaped by multiple crises and illuminate the historical and material conditions undergirding these crises through a critical distance. Such a management of affect shades into a politics of artistic unsentimentality that is marked by a rejection of neoliberal-codified forms of empathy, opening up new affective grounds for sentimental literature beyond immediate identification and pathos