This article will consider Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” – which “chronologically coincides with the end of the postmodernism debates” (Smith, 424) – through the lens of two American novels published in 2020: Percival Everett’s Telephone and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life. Stylistically, these novels are quite different, and I will discuss them individually as well as unpack their similarities, examining their mutual relevance to contemporary fiction’s affective renewal.
View More “New year, new data”: Percival Everett’s Telephone, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, and the Future of the “Affective Turn”Author: George Kowalik
George Kowalik is a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at King’s College London, working on contemporary Anglo-American fiction and the distinction between 'postmodernism' and 'post-postmodernism' in the work of Percival Everett, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace. He is a graduate of the University of Reading, Co-editor at King's English, Assistant Editor at Coastal Shelf, and a short fiction and culture writer. He can be found on Twitter at @kowalik_george.