Instructor: Huh
R 2:00 PM – 4:50 PM
The term “ambivalence” was coined in the early 20th century to describe a psychological disorder descriptive of individuals who confront too many ethical, political, and consumer choices and are unable to decide among them. As an individual deficiency or failing, it has typically been judged through a negative lens—unfortunate, unpromising, pathological, or dangerous—and as something to overcome or resolve. Over the past 20 years, however, ambivalence has begun to be invoked by queers and feminists—including Jennifer Nash, Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, Clare Hemmings, and José Esteban Muñoz—as a political emotion, as well as a structural condition of life under neo-liberalism. While ambivalence as such is not explicitly theorized in their work, it seems clear that across a broad interdisciplinary field, ambivalence is emerging as a nascent analytic lens.
Ambivalence has been central to early modern studies: consider the tortured indecision of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; the potent mix of desire and aggression of Milton’s Satan; and the voicing of love, desire, rage, and abjection in the sonnets of Sidney, Spenser, and Donne. Circumscribed by its modernist legacy, however, the analysis of ambivalence has been limited to the psychic conflicts of individual subjects, and critics typically assume that the aim, whether in poetry, comedy or tragedy, is to overcome ambivalence in order to decisively act as an agent of one’s own desire.
But what can the concept of ambivalence actually offer us? This seminar offers an opportunity to engage with the concept of ambivalence through a broader and more political lens. We will read ambivalence within and around early modern texts in order to join in reconceptualizing ambivalence as: 1) an affective capacity, 2) a political emotion, and/or 3) a structural condition—or something else! We will consider ambivalence’s specific epistemological value as a conceptual category that holds space for conflicting emotions, contending historical phenomena, and overlapping affective, ethical, and political commitments; ambivalence asks us to consider important tensions and binaries between subjection and liberation, certainty and uncertainty, and skepticism and conviction. This course will provide an intensive, inclusive environment for the study of ambivalent approaches to early modern literature, but students will also have the opportunity to move beyond this period in their final projects.