Emotive Realism

Questions of pleasure or readers' affective involvement in works of literature, first sidelined by the New Critics, were seen as either irrelevant or subsumable to a scholarly emphasis on the ideological and epistemological agendas of authors writing under the sign of reahsm.2 "To call oneself a realist," Kaplan writes, "means to make a claim . . . for the cognitive value of fiction . . . and also for one's own cultural authority" (13, emphasis added)-a phenomenon that Phillip Banish extends to the current crop of scholars studying it.3 Whereas scholars from Jane Tompkins to Elizabeth Barnes have in recent decades thoughtfully assessed the philosophical seriousness of the sentimental novel, critics have been notably reserved about the affective potency of works of literary realism.4 Yet there is another story to be unearthed, one that features Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) as an instructive site for correcting prevalent understandings of literary realism that associate it with "cognitive value" rather than aesthetic experience: with the rational, and rationalizing, mind instead of the feeling body. The commotion of modernity seemed to pose unique challenges to the delicate equilibrium of body and mind, while feelings were understood to provide a crucial conduit, albeit one that was easily damaged or derailed, through which individuals could negotiate a volatile environment. section two of this essay presents a reading of the reverberative humor of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a work that is exemplary in establishing the human body's essential role in acts of apprehension.