On 24 August 2026 at 16:15, Sven Blehner will defend his doctoral thesis “Intimacy and Affect in the Contemporary American Novel” for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature.
Supervisor:
Professor Raili Marling, University of Tartu
Opponent:
Professor Gregory J. Seigworth, Millersville University (USA)
Summary
Intimacy is usually imagined as a future-orientated project involving positive affects and following set social formulas. Such imaginings often hide intimacy’s darker side: the violence, cruelty, and negative affects that may accompany normative intimacies. There are also intimacies that do not follow normative boundaries and emerge when normative intimacies do not fulfil their promise. Literary texts are an excellent medium for experimenting with and for analysing intimacy.
To analyse how intimacy and related affects are depicted in contemporary American novels, the thesis uses affect and queer theories as its theoretical framework. Affect refers to a personal or collective intensity that is distinct from but in practice entangled with emotions and feelings. This entanglement provides the means for identifying affects and their effects. In the thesis, queerness refers to being abrasive against the normative. Queerness is put into a dialogue with Jack Halberstam’s take on wildness and some concepts developed by Gilles Deleuze to illuminate queerness’ productive and transformative potential.
Based on the careful analysis of six novels, the thesis argues that in addition to unmaking love (Shelden 2017: 75), the contemporary American novel also unmakes kinship. However, it also suggests potential alternatives in the form of queered intimacies that, while sites of both negative and positive affects, also offer care, comfort, support, and solidarity in unexpected places and modes. The aim of the thesis is to draw attention to and analyse these queer and minor intimacies that happen in the everyday of the ordinary world; intimacies without fixed rules, formulas, or genres; and intimacies that are queer(ed) or wild and have no specific goal.
