Schriftsinn und Epochalität: Zur historischen Prägnanz allegorischer und symbolischer Sinnstiftung. Bernhard Huss and David Nelting, eds. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift: Beihefte 81. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 412 pp. €58.
stitutes an ethics of cohabitation” (143) given questions of “resource competition” in “a planet of limit space” (137–38). Materialist approaches to affect studies are evident, as well, in contributions by Julian Yates and David Landreth. Yates demonstrates how forms of personhood are linked to material-semiotic tropes like otium, “a wakeful but disassociated state” during which one is “a vegetal being allied to pure growth” (73). Landreth does not address the materialist ontology of affect, but instead asks how affective stances toward the past allow things that matter to acquire substance and become materialized or, contrarily, how affects, like envy, are seen to “unmake” the matter of history. Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts successfully “use[s] affect as a prism through which to read early modern cultural, economic, and political phenomena” (5). In doing so, it contributes substantially to scholarly efforts to historicize affect and emotion, and to ongoing deliberations on the relationship between thinking and feeling.