Leif Schenstead-Harris ACCUTE 2017 28 May 2017 A Question of Affect: Weird Literature and Bruno Schulz, Jamaica Kincaid, Jeff VanderMeer They don’t want ghost stories anymore; it is real experiences that made their flesh creep. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees” (1943) I. Introduction to the modern weird In October 2012, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer released their voluminous collection The Weird, supplemented the same month by a companion literary website, the Weird Fiction Review. Compiling work from one hundred and one writers of over twenty different nationalities, these conjoined ventures serve as initial maps to a literary terrain otherwise often marginalized. In general, the weird is affiliated with critiques of rationality, gender and imperialism, and the Anthropocene, to use only a few examples. In this essay, I argue that an affective economy unites these manifold strands of the imagination that compose weird literature. These affects resemble a set of transgressions built of dreams, collapses, and regrowths; all take place as affective structures of the imagination, where “affect” signifies a force that creates relationships between bodies and the world (Berlant 2011). Such “transgressions” are merely the tipping points where normative orders of epistemological “realisms” are reordered and poured into the shape of their future. If something is “weird,” its aesthetic seems to be both uncontestable but yet unprecedented. Miéville calls such an aesthetic the attempt to “shove a fate-shaped key at the Weird keyhole” (1114): the future’s selective reading of present unknowns is always going to be unpredictable and strange. Crucially, the site of the Weird is the untimely present viewed through newly comprehending eyes; if imagined as a space, “its interior is less repressed than unrecognized” (Miéville 1115). As a genre of what I want to call “the emerging event,” after Berlant (5), the aesthetic of the weird relates affective structures of unrecognizability. I do not suggest that there is a homogeneous genre that incorporates all “weird”