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Kathleen Stewart (1)

Author of Ordinary Affects

For other authors named Kathleen Stewart, see the disambiguation page.

14 Works 276 Members 6 Reviews

About the Author

Image credit: Courtesy of Allen and Unwin

Works by Kathleen Stewart

Ordinary Affects (2007) 134 copies
Louis A Normal Novel (1993) 18 copies
The after life (2008) 12 copies
Nightflowers (1996) 9 copies
Men of bad character (2011) 9 copies
Spilt milk (1995) 6 copies
Victim Train (1992) 6 copies
The Red Room (1999) 6 copies
The black butterfly (2001) 3 copies
The white star (1997) 2 copies
Snow (1994) 2 copies

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Common Knowledge

Gender
female

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Reviews

If I'd stayed in academia, I'd hope to have been able to write in the vein of Stewart.
 
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KatrinkaV | May 14, 2023 |
This was a compelling book in that I couldn't put it down. However much the main protagonist was a complete train wreck who most of the time I wanted to strangle, the author had the skill to make the reader want to go on for the ride. And to be honest, there were moments of self recognition in the obsession and self delusion of the main character. We've all been there, I'm just not sure I want to go back there.
 
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nautilus | Sep 20, 2017 |
http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/ordinary affects/

A couple of pages in, I decided that even though this is a scholarly work, probably belonging to the discipline of postmodern anthropology, I lack the background to be able to read it in a scholarly manner. Instead, I let it kind of break over me. I read it as if it was poetry. And I enjoyed it. I can't tell you what it's about, mind you. It abounds in anecdotes, ranging from a pleasant but odd encounter in a check-out queue to horrific violence, from bizarre plane travel incidents to odd things seen from the car. It offers fascinating reflections on public responses to big events – the OJ trials, the Columbine shootings, child care sex abuse scandals, nuclear waste disposal, 11 September 2001. It positively bristles with gnomic utterances that would make great epigraphs for poems ('The ordinary can turn on you,' or 'Dream meets nightmare in the flick of an eye') or citations in other scholarly works ('Like a live wire, the subject [which I think here means a person] channels what's going on around it in a the process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions and expressions, it's a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits').

Ordinary Affects deals in something that precedes thought: 'The ordinary can happen before the mind can think.' 'Something' is a word that Stewart uses often and interestingly, usually in the phrase 'or something', as if to insist on the provisional nature of her thinking. At least part of what Stewart means by 'ordinary affect' is what happens when we pay attention, how we integrate, or not, the many influences on our perception, our emotional responses, our unreflective thoughts.

I found myself remembering the only lines I know from the US poet Muriel Rukeyser:

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT THEY TELL YOU TO FORGET

(The capitals are hers.)

If I get a chance I'll re-read this book, though I expect it will be a matter of letting it break over my head again.
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1 vote
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shawjonathan | May 4, 2010 |
a beautifully crafted and compelling memoir
 
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frida170258 | Nov 1, 2008 |

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Works
14
Members
276
Popularity
#84,078
Rating
3.9
Reviews
6
ISBNs
42

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