In 1962, Place Ville Marie, Montreal’s cross-shaped office tower and underground shopping mall—named after the French Catholic settlement of unceded Mohawk territory that became the colonial city—opened to the public as the Commonwealth’s tallest “nerve centre” and “breathing machine.” The same year, Silvan Tomkins, the father of affect theory, published Volume I of Affect Imagery Consciousness, which exuberantly draws on the then-sensational cybernetic brain-computer metaphor. 1962 also saw the publication of Story Sequence Analysis by Magda Arnold, a luddistic and devoutly Catholic psychologist who mothered the monumental cognitive appraisal theory of emotion. Modernist Affect Grid’s essay-poems triangulate these events as they emerge amidst the Cold War tech race’s paranoid and projective ambition. 

Author Bio:

Alisha Dukelow lives in Los Angeles, where she is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Southern California. She is interested in the relationship between innovative modern and contemporary literature, the mind/body, time, and the environment. She received an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia in Montreal, and her poetry and fiction have been published in places such as The Malahat Review, PRISM international, and Room. Her chapbook of poems, Pareidolia (2020), is available through Anstruther Press.