IAS Book Launch: Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment

ABOUT THE BOOK
Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment offers a comparative critical study of contemporary fiction. It intervenes in discussions about contemporary fiction in its literary-historical relationship to postmodernism and in its socio-historical relationship to neoliberalism. It argues that contemporary literature is dominated by affective questions that are rooted in, but not fully subsumed by, neoliberalism: How can I experience reality (as real)?; How can I feel attached to someone? This ‘affective dominant’ signals a diachronical shift from postmodernist fiction’s pervasive epistemological and ontological reflections to a focus on questions of an affective nature in contemporary fiction. It also offers a perspective on contemporary fiction as mediating neoliberalism’s double-edged dynamics of commodifying affective experience while privatising collective experience.

The book argues that contemporary fiction develops emergent mediations of neoliberal dynamics, with the affective crises the latter yield. It studies this affective crisis in relation to central themes as identity and climate crisis, and through prevalent contemporary genres as autofiction and coming-of-age narratives. The book explores a transnational corpus, including authors Heike Geissler, Ben Lerner, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Lieke Marsman, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Niña Weijers and Alejandro Zambra, amongst others.

Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment. A comparative study of contemporary fiction in neoliberal ruins was published by UCL Press on 21 April 2026.

ABOUT THE EVENT 
Hans Demeyer and Sven Vitse will present their book, and Emily Baker (Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies, UCL), Robbie Duschinsky (Professor of Social Science and Health, Cambridge University) and Daisy Hildyard (author of, most notably, the novel Emergency and the essay The Second Body) will respond before opening the discussion to a Q&A with the audience.