Ideology, Affect and the Body in Alberto Méndez’s Los girasoles ciegos

This article explores the possibility of reading literary texts through affect, taking as samples extracts from the poetry of Miguel Hernández and Alberto Méndez’s Los girasoles ciegos. The argument draws on the ideas of Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler and recent work on affect and mirror neurons to propose that an affective reading of literary texts can support the claims of theorists, from John Dewey to Timothy O’Leary and Jenefer Robison, that literary texts can have an impact on the reader as subject and that this process, in turn, can contribute to the development of the democratic subject.