Yaohong Gao

This paper traces a concise genealogy of emotion studies in Western thought, showing how emotion moved from the margins of rationalist paradigms back to the center of humanities research and culminated in the early twenty-first-century “affective turn.” It then maps two dominant pathways: (1) the Spinoza–Deleuze–Massumi philosophical-ontological line, which conceptualizes affect as embodied intensity and relational becoming prior to codified emotion; and (2) the Tomkins–Sedgwick–Berlant–Ahmed feminist line, which explains how affect/emotion is scripted, regulated, and circulated within social norms and power structures. Finally, the paper argues that these approaches collectively redirect literary studies from representing feelings to analyzing mechanisms of affect production and its cultural-political embeddedness.

affective turn; genealogy of emotion studies

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