Affect

Front Cover
The Porcupine's Quill, Oct 21, 2020 - Fiction - 152 pages

Have you ever met a person who actually seems larger than life? I did, once, just where you’d least expect him to be (standing around), in an environment you wouldn’t be able to fit him into (the courtyard outside the Philosophy building), if the concept meant what it implies. Such a being makes us question whether we are, in fact, so limited, with the one life and the one death, and nothing else to reasonably look forward to, whether the whole system is flawed, whether it’s not the case that they’ve cheated the system and come out on the other side of it still living, living more, doing something more than living.

That was Logan for me.

Affect is the story of a hyper-rational and unapologetically cerebral philosophy graduate student, obsessed with both death and Logan. Their relationship develops through a series of surreal events (in which corpses appear with disturbing frequence), where Logan comes to infiltrate the narrator’s psyche and occasions the collision of her interior and exterior worlds.

Affect examines and interprets, in prose that is spare, poetic, and philosophical, how we think about life and death, time and distance, and the deeply affecting effects of an intense entanglement of a ‘one’ with an ‘other’.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
7
Section 2
10
Section 3
16
Section 4
19
Section 5
27
Section 6
36
Section 7
39
Section 8
44
Section 14
89
Section 15
91
Section 16
97
Section 17
102
Section 18
112
Section 19
115
Section 20
119
Section 21
132

Section 9
57
Section 10
61
Section 11
73
Section 12
80
Section 13
86
Section 22
140
Section 23
144
Section 24
147
Section 25
151
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About the author (2020)

Charlene Elsby has a Ph.D. in philosophy from McMaster University, where she worked on Aristotle’s notion of non-existence. She is the president of the North American Roman Ingarden Society and vice president of the North American Society for Early Phenomenology. She is the author of several academic works on metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, literature, and logic. Her first novel, Hexis (Clash Books), was published in February 2020. She lives in Ottawa.

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