Tapping into Weird: Contemporary Singapore Short Fiction by Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi-Sheng

This chapter focuses on short fiction published over the last decade in Singapore and stresses the significance of affective response rather than political critique and dissenting perspectives residing in content and form. In particular, using insights from affect theory, it analyzes stories that seek to deliberately evoke in readers a sensation of weirdness. “Weirdness” is apprehended here as a feeling, a produced effect and affective response variously manifested and elicited. Although it may reasonably be associated most closely with speculative fiction which features alternate worlds, different universes, and parallel temporalities without a unitary and stable frame of reference, the evocation of weirdness as an aesthetic response, I argue, cuts across different forms and sub-genres. Weirdness is often unsettling if not disconcerting, producing a suspension of time, judgment, and meaning. In their short stories, the weirdness that Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi-Sheng evoke constitutes an opacity, a deliberate stymieing of meaning in opposition to an internalized culture of state-imposed norms emphasizing unequivocal and unitary meaning, and the straight and narrow, in more ways than one. Weirdness as affect casts productive doubt and uncertainty on that which passes for unquestionable doxological truths and irrefutable narratives. Increasingly, it reflects a not always explicitly articulated sense that social change at a fundamental level must also involve the transformation of configurations of feelings and emotions, not merely the sharp thrust-and-parry of rational debate and thought.