the social sciences and media studies that suggests that affects are socially transmissible. Critics associated with what Patricia Clough has defined as" the affective turn" argue that preconscious feelings and impulses are altered by smells, hormones, gestures, and images, and that these affective incitements change depending upon the qualitative conditions of social relations. This understanding of affect suggests that what we imagine to be individual and specific-impulses, attitudes, emotions, and feelingsin fact have a social, historical, and therefore shared dimension. Neither biologically deterministic nor humanistic, this approach allows for bodily experience to be understood as a dynamic registration of environmental change. The understanding of affect as culturally instigated and biologi-cally registered is now seen as having relevance for the study of cultural production, aesthetics, and literature specifically. But such an approach would seem at odds with the study of postmodernist literature in particular, given the resilience of Fredric Jameson's assertion that postmodernism entails" a waning of affect"(10) and a general critical consensus that postmodernist literature tends to be tonally-and therefore affectively-cold: if we are looking for the production of affect, postmodernist literature, which seems to lack material, bodies, and people, seems to be the most unlikely place to find it. 1

We might call this commonly held cluster of beliefs the affective hy-pothesis. The affective hypothesis posits that postmodernist literature is characterized by an absence of tonal warmth and that the absence of tonal warmth in a given work signals an absence of affective charge inherent to the work. Crucially, while scholars now widely agree that the wave of high postmodernist fiction has crested, the prevalence of the affective