This chapter explores the interplay between emotions and memory, highlighting the interrelations between regulatory and memory processes. In the first section we describe how, through indirect and direct influences, emotions impact every phase of the episodic memory cycle: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Whereas many of these influences are attributed to the amygdala and hippocampus, recent work has emphasized the role of a broad network of regions, extending well beyond these medial temporal lobe regions. In the second section, we focus on the role of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in adjusting the content, emotionality, and narrative context at each phase of the episodic memory cycle. In the third section, we discuss the reciprocal interactions between emotions and memory: Our memories serve as triggers for emotions and can be used as an emotion regulation device, while our emotions and emotion regulation goals can likewise influence our memories. The final section highlights broad directions for future research.

Over the last thirty years, affective neuroscience has become a royal road to our understanding of emotion and other affective phenomena, being both a core discipline of the affective sciences, and an engine for the rise of affectivism. After a brief discussion of the role of human affective neuroscience in affectivism, the chapter addresses some terminological and taxonomy-related issues before suggesting a consensual definition of emotion. Next, five major families of theories of emotions are presented in relation to five components of emotion. This review illustrates the fact that different families of theories typically focus on different components – even if each family also often considers some of the other components to a lesser extent. Whereas expression is central to basic emotion theory, action tendencies are central to motivational theories, autonomic reaction is central to bodily/interoceptive theories, feeling is central to constructionist theories, and the role of cognition in emotion-elicitation is central to appraisal theories.

This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.

Beckett’s television plays stage a seeming disparity between their often difficult and affectively challenging subject matter, and the deliberate aestheticism and formalism of their representational strategies. This is made even starker by the austere formal qualities of the medium: the limited, rigidly framed TV screen, its flatness, the shades of grey in a black and white broadcast, the stark televisual light, produced by the firing of a cathode tube onto the television screen, the frequently ‘flat’ or ‘indifferent’ tone of their voice-over, and the often ‘staring’ camera eye, as Beckett called it in his manuscript drafts. And yet, the answer to how the plays’ affective content is communicated seems to reside precisely in the peculiarity and precision of their form, in the clinically framed shots and the abstracted, calculatedly affectless sets, in their detailed foregrounding of the artifice of representation, in their late-modernist, minimal, pared-down style, even in the brevity and semantic reticence of the scripts. This chapter will consider the question of affect and the resistance to affect in Ghost Trio, … but the clouds…, Nacht und Träume, and Eh Joe.

The main focus of this chapter is on another class of actions (in addition to the habits discussed in Chapter 2) that don’t result from decision-making processes. So in that sense they aren’t intentional and don’t fit the standard belief-desire model. These are actions that are directly caused by affective states (emotions, desires, and so on). Some of these actions are merely expressive, whereas others give the appearance of being instrumental, and are generally (but mistakenly) interpreted as goal-directed. But the chapter begins with a review of some basic findings from affective science and neuroscience. This is to set up the discussion in this and later chapters.

Percy Shelley’s relationship to the so-called ‘Lake School’ Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) has long been framed as a narrative of the earlier poets’ broken political commitments and the missed personal and emotional encounters of the ‘second-generation’ Romantic at his later post-revolutionary moment. Enriching the interpretive texture of this account, this chapter understands Shelley’s complex, productive relationship with Wordsworth, in particular, not simply through the charge of apostasy (political falling-away) but as an affective and poetic performance of inter-generational grief. I engage reading methods drawn from speech-act theory, affect studies, sociolinguistics, and deconstruction to show the weird temporalities of Shelley’s major poems addressing Lake Poet disconnection: ‘To Wordsworth’, Peter Bell the Third, and The Witch of Atlas. I conclude that Shelley’s generous lateral conception of unbounded agency opens his thinking up to an enlarged remit for receptive disappointments.

The final chapter serves to draw the various strands of the book together, surveying what has been discovered, and expanding on the fundamental arguments of the book. It therefore begins with an analysis of Pinterest, which stands as an emblem of all that literacy means in postdigital times, whether that be sophisticated multimodal practices, durational time, or algorithmic logic. Looking back over the screen lives discussed in the book, including those of the crescent voices and of Samuel Sandor, this chapter crystallizes the personal take on screen lives that the book offers, reiterating the need to ‘undo the digital’ and find the human in, on, with, at, and against screens. It also presents some of the problems scholarship must meet, such as digital inequalities, whether that be in terms of time, awareness, or skill with technology. However, despite the considerable negative forces at work in screen lives which the book has taken care to unravel, this concluding chapter advocates ‘taking the higher ground’ and enacting wonder in interactions with screens.

This chapter introduces the book, laying out its central questions, including what it means to be postdigital, what diverse kinds of life and humanity can be found in screens, and what new technologies such as automation and AI might mean for screen lives. Chapter 1 also describes both the background and aspirations of the book, as well as its structure and a guide on how to approach reading it. Beyond discussing the defining research questions, this chapter also details the ideas underpinning the book, including the notion that there has been a tangible shift between how we related to screens a decade ago and how we do now. In addition, the book is guided by an awareness of the often conflicting and intricate relationships people have with screens, as well as the concept of the ‘smallness of screen lives’, inspired by Deborah Hicks’ notion. The Comfort of Screens is a tapestry which unfolds a story of postdigital life, sewn from the fabric of 17 people’s screen lives, interviews with whom form the backbone of the book. These ‘crescent voices’ are also introduced in this chapter.

Chapter 4 delves deeper into screen life, adopting an even more human-centred focus, in order to uncover the affective aspect of screen lives. Maintaining an embodied approach, this chapter explores how affective experiences with screens are intentionally elicited through how media is designed, how affect on screens might differ from affect outside screens, and how digital affect can inform practices, and practices induce affect. The chapter begins by defining affect, then digital affect more specifically, before turning to interviewees for their perspectives on how they feel and sense on screens, touching on topics such as micro digital affect, algorithms, and the pandemic. Crescent voices in this chapter help illustrate how digital affect is vital to understanding digital literacy practices and screen lives, especially the double-edged aspects of our affective relationships to screens.

Having shown how conflict belongs to the goodness of creaturely life and can be generative of human social flourishing, this chapter revisits the question of political community. “Agonistic community,” as I delineate it, incorporates the creative use of conflict in order to forge collectivity across difference, thereby reconceptualizing political community and difference in mutually constitutive terms. I begin the chapter by considering two neglected figures in the history of Christian political thought: the early modern Calvinist Johannes Althusius and the twentieth-century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Both Althusius and Simon, I show, approach politics by theorizing the distinct features of creaturely action and relation, and so center the work of politics on the activities of shared judgment and action. The remainder of the chapter takes up the subject of democratic judgment, showing how agonistic democracy generates shared judgment and action without transcending or effacing conflict and difference. I conclude by examining the community organizing practices of the Industrial Areas Foundation as an instance of agonistic democratic community.