Publishing, Literature, and Responsibility

Public Feelings, Published Feelings: Authorship and Responsibility in an Affective Industry"
This paper explores the intersection of authorship, responsibility, and feelings—both public and published. Its focus on affect is variegated across literary texts, particularly those who explicitly and often meta-textually deal with the publishing industry (e.g. Everett's Erasure, Kuang's Yellowface, Rushdie's Knife), and the larger contexts into which individual texts and their authors are embedded and in which notions of accountability become particularly salient. With Rushdie, for example, the paper will extend to Rushdie’s public criticism of Bernardine Evaristo and the Royal Society of Literature following their alleged lack of solidarity after he was stabbed multiple times at a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, New York.