Abstract
This article offers an integration between theoretical and analytical perspectives on emotion in postmodern fiction. Responding to the influential critical assumption – traceable to Fredric Jameson and reiterated in various strands of criticism – that postmodernism entails a “waning of affect”, the study interrogates the notion that postmodern texts are characterised by emotional thinness, tonal coolness, and a structural hostility towards affective engagement. Against this critical commonplace, the article engages with Jenefer Robinson’s scepticism regarding the possibility of meaningful emotional involvement in postmodern fiction. Robinson argues that emotion plays a critical role in the reader’s interpretation of realistic narratives, but doubts whether it can play a similar role in the understanding of postmodern narratives. The form of the postmodern text – which, according to Robinson, prevents the reader from being swept up in the story – lies at the heart of her doubt. In order to evaluate her doubts, the depiction and role of emotion in Koos Prinsloo’s postmodern short story, “Die jonkmanskas” (The bachelor’s chest), is examined with the assistance of neuroscientific theories. The article provides a more nuanced account of how postmodern works may, in fact, generate, organise and intensify emotional response. The article thus positions itself at the intersection of postmodern narratology, affect theory, and cognitive literary studies, seeking to demonstrate how postmodern form and affective experience need not be oppositional categories.
The opening sections situate the study within broader debates about postmodernism and affect. Jameson’s theorisation of the postmodern as a cultural dominant is revisited, particularly his insistence that postmodernism is marked by depthlessness and an erosion of the modernist belief in expressive interiority. Jameson’s claims about “free-floating intensities” and the dissolution of the centred subject provide the ideological backdrop against which Robinson formulates her doubts about emotion in postmodern fiction. Robinson’s model of emotional response, grounded in contemporary affective science, differentiates between non-cognitive affective appraisals, physiological responses and cognitively mediated emotional evaluations. She argues that realist fiction carefully orchestrates these processes through narrative form, thereby enabling emotional education, recognition and moral insight. She believes that, by contrast, postmodern fiction interrupts these processes by continually foregrounding textuality, form and artifice.
The article then contextualises Robinson’s argument within the recent “affective turn” in the humanities. I emphasise that this renewed attention to embodiment, emotion and experiential immediacy should not be misread as a negation of the postmodern. Rather, the affective turn offers new tools for nuancing how postmodern strategies operate at the threshold between affect and emotion, between precognitive intensities and their cognitive articulation. Drawing on Brian Massumi’s influential distinction between affect (prepersonal intensity) and emotion (codified, narrativised feeling), the article contends that postmodern literary texts can perform significant work precisely at the boundary between these two registers.
From this theoretical foundation, the article turns to neuroscientific perspectives on emotional processing, relying primarily on Norman Holland’s synthesis of affective neuroscience. Holland’s study provides a functional model through which emotional responses to literary stimuli may be examined without reducing them to subjective impressionism. The article’s methodological intervention lies in combining Robinson’s account of emotional appraisal with Holland’s neuroscientific model in order to track how emotional responses are both elicited and cognitively monitored during the reading of a postmodern text.
These frameworks are then applied to Prinsloo’s “Die jonkmanskas”, a paradigmatic instance of South African postmodern short fiction. The story’s nested narrative structure, metafictional self-awareness, oscillating viewpoints, and recursive mise-en-abyme configurations have typically attracted criticism for their formal ingenuity rather than their emotional dynamics. However, the article demonstrates that Prinsloo’s narrative strategies promote rather than inhibit affective engagement. The analysis shows that the reader’s emotional involvement is not diminished by the story’s fragmentation; rather, it is redirected, refracted, and ultimately deepened through the text’s manipulation of perspective, its juxtaposition of narrative levels, and its layering of intergenerational memory.
Through a careful reading of key episodes, the article illustrates how emotional cues (such as the protagonist’s intimate fixation on the jonkmanskas, the depiction of familial tenderness and distance, the political resonances embedded in seemingly mundane details, and the affectively charged contrast between the grandfather’s self-mythologising narrative and the grandson’s disillusioned critical annotations) activate Holland’s categories of direct stimulation, emotional memory, and empathetic mirroring. The story’s emotional force derives not from conventional realist immersion, but from the friction between narrative frames, from the exposure of competing epistemic registers, and from the reader’s shifting allegiances as the text disrupts inherited genealogies of meaning.
The article argues that the metafictional and postmodern features of “Die jonkmanskas”, rather than nullifying affective response, shape a distinctive form of emotional cognition. The reader’s awareness of textual construction does not preclude emotional experience; instead, it compels a more vigilant, self-reflexive mode of emotional processing. The text constantly interrupts, reframes and recontextualises the emotional cues it provides, requiring the reader to re-evaluate affective impulses within a broader ethical and historical matrix. This dynamic produces a heightened form of emotional attunement in which affective responses are repeatedly scrutinised, destabilised and reconstituted.
The article concludes that emotion can indeed be elicited in postmodernist fiction in ways similar to realist fiction. The postmodernist form – despite its highly controlled, stylised nature – does not necessarily prevent readers from becoming emotionally engaged. Instead, the form in “Die jonkmanskas” itself shapes the emotional experience. Unlike in realist fiction, where emotional responses tend to be integrated into a coherent moral or cognitive insight, postmodernist narratives leave readers with fragmented, directionless, or self-conscious emotions – what Lyotard calls “intensities”. In “Die jonkmanskas” empathy and moral tension are present, but mediated through irony, ambiguity and disorientation, preventing any final integration or moral conclusion. Continuous reinterpretation of the story’s embedded narratives destabilises any final integration or interpretation. Even though the emotions elicited in the postmodern story remain ambivalent “intensities”, they still influence interpretation: In this postmodern context, confusion precedes emotion rather than the other way around. The postmodern form shapes not a diminished emotional landscape but a differently configured one – fractured, recursive, affectively potent precisely because it refuses to stabilise meaning. The study therefore challenges prevailing assumptions about the affective deficiency of postmodern literary texts and offers a model for understanding how postmodern form can deepen, rather than diminish, emotional experience.
Keywords: affect; “Die jonkmanskas”; emotion; Norman Holland; Koos Prinsloo; postmodernism; Jenefer Robinson
- This article’s featured image was created by Andrea Piacquadio and obtained from Pexels.
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans
Affek, emosie en die postmodernistiese verhaal: ’n ondersoek na Koos Prinsloo se "Die jonkmanskas"