Joshua Gooch – författare

In Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity, Joshua Gooch argues that Dickens’s novels offer models of feeling that illuminate the dissensions that accompany life’s precariousness under capitalism. By examining the role of violence, anxiety, surprise, and suspense in Dickens’s novels, Gooch explores how they represent and shape emotions to create rhythms specific to their historical moment. To unearth Dickensian affects, Gooch examines how some of Dickens’s novels yoke elements in their difference to signal different kinds and ways of feeling, what he terms affective form. This patterning of elements links a text’s ways of feeling to its conjuncture and locates lines of flight that allow its representations of emotion to become something else. The violence of Oliver Twist links its satire of the New Poor Law to the post-abolition period of apprenticeship in the West Indies. The pervasive anxiety of The Old Curiosity Shop links Nell’s journey to arguments economic inequality focused on questions of inheritance and land reform. The surprise of David Copperfield binds its interests in questions of character and trust to Britain’s professional world and credit markets. And the suspense of Great Expectations gestures toward a sense of shame and demand for new models of masculine character also seen in the Volunteer rifle militias. Dickensian Affects argues that for Dickens, questions of feeling reveal the precarity of feeling itself. For Dickens, to feel is to know the possibility of feeling otherwise.

In Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity, Joshua Gooch argues that Dickens’s novels offer models of feeling that illuminate the dissensions that accompany life’s precariousness under capitalism. By examining the role of violence, anxiety, surprise, and suspense in Dickens’s novels, Gooch explores how they represent and shape emotions to create rhythms specific to their historical moment. To unearth Dickensian affects, Gooch examines how some of Dickens’s novels yoke elements in their difference to signal different kinds and ways of feeling, what he terms affective form. This patterning of elements links a text’s ways of feeling to its conjuncture and locates lines of flight that allow its representations of emotion to become something else. The violence of Oliver Twist links its satire of the New Poor Law to the post-abolition period of apprenticeship in the West Indies. The pervasive anxiety of The Old Curiosity Shop links Nell’s journey to arguments economic inequality focused on questions of inheritance and land reform. The surprise of David Copperfield binds its interests in questions of character and trust to Britain’s professional world and credit markets. And the suspense of Great Expectations gestures toward a sense of shame and demand for new models of masculine character also seen in the Volunteer rifle militias. Dickensian Affects argues that for Dickens, questions of feeling reveal the precarity of feeling itself. For Dickens, to feel is to know the possibility of feeling otherwise.

This book offers a much-needed study of the Victorian novel's role in representing and shaping the service sector's emergence. Arguing that prior accounts of the novel's relation to the rise of finance have missed the emergence of a wider service sector, it traces the effects of service work's many forms and class positions in the Victorian novel.

What contemporary horror films teach us about the cruelties of capitalist societyCapitalism Hates You uses the horror film genre as a tool to diagnose and expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism. Through incisive critical analyses of popular films such as Get Out, Drag Me to Hell, Hereditary, The Babadook, and many others, Joshua Gooch draws connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Gooch highlights the work of women, trans, and nonwhite filmmakers to show how the remarkable diversity of twenty-first-century horror cinema can provide an expansive catalog of capitalism’s varying forms of oppression. Studying films that interrogate such urgent topics as gentrification, climate change, and reproductive labor, he demonstrates how contemporary horror films give affective shape to the negative undercurrents of our present socioeconomic system. Capitalism Hates You argues that these films and their material conditions can deepen our understanding of essential concepts in contemporary Marxism, from the theory of value and changing forms of commodification to the labor of social reproduction, the abolition of the family, and the necessity of ecosocialism. Synthesizing various strands of Marxist thought, Gooch sheds light on the growing field of socially conscious horror films, examining how they pinpoint and exaggerate latent feelings of dread and discomfort to reflect the ills of society. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

What contemporary horror films teach us about the cruelties of capitalist societyCapitalism Hates You uses the horror film genre as a tool to diagnose and expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism. Through incisive critical analyses of popular films such as Get Out, Drag Me to Hell, Hereditary, The Babadook, and many others, Joshua Gooch draws connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Gooch highlights the work of women, trans, and nonwhite filmmakers to show how the remarkable diversity of twenty-first-century horror cinema can provide an expansive catalog of capitalism’s varying forms of oppression. Studying films that interrogate such urgent topics as gentrification, climate change, and reproductive labor, he demonstrates how contemporary horror films give affective shape to the negative undercurrents of our present socioeconomic system. Capitalism Hates You argues that these films and their material conditions can deepen our understanding of essential concepts in contemporary Marxism, from the theory of value and changing forms of commodification to the labor of social reproduction, the abolition of the family, and the necessity of ecosocialism. Synthesizing various strands of Marxist thought, Gooch sheds light on the growing field of socially conscious horror films, examining how they pinpoint and exaggerate latent feelings of dread and discomfort to reflect the ills of society. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.