Across a series of radical re-reappraisals of canonical postmodern texts, primarily films, from Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism to David Cronenberg's Crash and Harmony Korine's Gummo, Duncan shows that the same postmodern archive that has proven resistant to strongly subject-based and object-oriented emotions, like anger and sadness, proves all too congenial to the idiosyncratic, borderline emotions, from knowingness, fascination and bewilderment to boredom and euphoria, that the book takes as its critical objects.

Pansy Duncan is Lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand, where she writes on media affect and aesthetics. Her articles have been published in a range of venues, including PMLA, Cultural Critique, Textual Practice, Screen, and Film Quarterly.

Introduction: Postmodernism and Emotion 1. Euphoria, Ecstasy, Sublimity: The Emotional Life of Postmodern Theory 2. Fascination: Between the Rough and the Glossy 3. Fear: Dead Subjects and Living Dolls 4. Bewilderment: The Ravaged Face of Postmodern Theory and Aesthetics 5. Boredom: Avant-Garde and Trash 6. Knowingness: Feeling Theory and its Other Restlessness: A Coda