social anxiety, OCD, PTSD, panic disorders, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, tropophobia, algophobia, anthropophobia, atelophobia, atychiphobia, autophobia, etc.) Narrative and visual representations of different types of anxiety and phobias (e.g. Representations of anxiety as (de-)normalization (Visual) narratology, voice, and anxiety Contemporary representations of the Uncanny (unheimlich) Exactly because labor is one of the main instruments to realize visions of a good, fulfilled life, representations of themes like risk, unemployment, social regression, precarization, etc., are particularly well-suited to explore the affective ecologies of the present.Ĭonsidering the kaleidoscopic manifestations of anxiety in history and its pertinence to our present time, this call for abstract inquires: How do literature and visual culture position anxiety in relation to work and affect? How can anxiety unfold or occlude a specific discourse of precarity? In which way can texts and images become the conduit of mitigating or exacerbating anxiety? What types and figures of anxiety are mediated and with what narratives, rhetoric, and metaphorical means? What forms of (waning) agency and solidarity are connected with the imaginary of anxiety? To what extent can new media technologies conduce, repress, or even transfigure everyday anxieties?Īmongst many possible approaches towards anxiety and precarity in literary studies and visual culture, article proposals may focus on, but are not limited to: It is no coincidence that recent volumes on representations of precarity (Korte & Regard 2014 Hogg & Simonsen 2021 Rys & Philipsen 2021) highlight affect and anxiety as leitmotifs. Next to existentialism, anxiety has also become an integral thread in recent phenomenological approaches to a life worth living (Wills 2008 Trigg 2017 Bergo 2021).ĭue to the entanglement of economic developments and affective ecologies, anxiety has become a recurrent theme in theoretical descriptions as well as in cultural representations of precarious work, too. In addition to its entanglement with labor and affect, anxiety has been a driving force for a myriad of extensional writers, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Dostoevsky, for whom anxiety would be a kind of “neuroexistentialist” mode of being (Caruso & Flanagan 2018). It is against this background that Guy Standing (2011), for instance, sees anxiety as fundamental to the precariat’s state of being, while public intellectuals and writers like Ilija Trojanow (2017) identify continuous “Angst” as a dominant affect in present-day economies. Accordingly, anxiety is intrinsically related to the narratives that shape our understanding of why a vision of the good life is at risk, as it is often induced by the actual risk or the imagined threat of losing a (relatively) stable status. It is no coincidence that anxiety, as a heightened state of insecurity and being-alarmed, has been on the rise, because radical transformations of the welfare state and the labor market have made those normative visions of a good life increasingly unattainable, producing a state of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). Often linked with the concept of “disorder”, anxieties are mostly mentioned in a context that frames personal and socio-economic behavioral patterns in terms of pathology, normality, and abnormality, which implicitly refer to normative views of what constitutes a “good life”. Ranging from general anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and phobias to the simple sentiment of being out of sort, anxieties operate as harbingers of imminent disruptions. To be anxious is to be on edge, not only psychologically, but also ontologically and existentially or to use Heidegger’s terms, it is to be in a state of “groundless floating” (1996). As the pandemic has made it palpable, anxieties can turn into pervasive affects with detrimental effects on the psychological well-being of the individual.
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