Name /cl553/CL55_3_A01armstrong/Mp_441 09/18/2014 08:15AM Plate # 0 pg 441 # 1 Contemporary Literature 55, 3 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/14/0003-0441  2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System NANCY ARMSTRONG The Affective Turn in Contemporary Fiction A bout two hundred years have passed, as Benedict Anderson tells the story, since novels featuring protag- onists that mirrored their readers’ norms and values first began to elicit sympathy from mass readerships in one nation after another. Given this impressive record, why would any novelist abandon the one formal component of the novel that would seem to guarantee its popular reception? Yet a number of contemporary novelists have done exactly that. Rather than rep- resentative men or women, the novelists I have in mind offer us protagonists that might more accurately be called human “extrem- ophiles,” a term for biological life-forms that survive under condi- tions thought incapable of sustaining biological life. Melinda Coo- per uses this term to explain how, in rethinking the limits against which such life was previously defined, the biosciences have also rethought its law of evolution as more innovative than adaptive. 1 I I owe thanks to John Frow and the Department of English at the University of Sydney for the opportunity to present a version of this argument and to Matthew Omelsky for serving as my very able research assistant. 1. Cooper explains that the recent discovery of extremophiles has fundamentally altered long-held assumptions about the entanglement of the biological and the geo- chemical. In rethinking the limits against which biological life was previously defined, the biological sciences have also redefined its law of evolution as “autopoetic rather than adaptive.” “If microorganisms are able to metabolize and transform inorganic matter into organic compounds,” she continues, “it becomes legitimate to inquire into their role in the geological evolution of the earth. Does life adapt to environmental niches, or actively incorporate and transform them?” (34–35).