Description
Book SynopsisHow to Do Things with Affects develops affect as a highly productive concept for both cultural analysis and the reading of aesthetic forms. Shifting the focus from individual experiences and the human interiority of personal emotions and feelings toward the agency of cultural objects, social arrangements, and aesthetic matter, the book examines how affects operate and are triggered by aesthetic forms, media events, and cultural practices. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries and emphasizing close reading, the collected essays explore manifold affective transmissions and resonances enacted by modernist literary works, contemporary visual arts, horror and documentary films, museum displays, and animated pornography, with a special focus on how they impact on political events, media strategies, and social situations. Contributors: Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Maria Boletsi, Eugenie Brinkema, Pietro Conte, Anne Fleig, Bernd Herzogenrath, Tomáš Jirsa, Matthias Lüthjohann, Susanna Paasonen, Christina Riley, Jan Slaby, Eliza Steinbock, Christiane Voss.
Trade Review"The major strengths of How to Do Things with Affects [...] are the multidisciplinary exemplification of a very general schema and the refinement of what exactly is meant by the stylish phrase, 'to restore agency to form.' Scholars working to recuperate literature and art as suitable objects of inquiry in affect studies will find several essays here that bolster that effort. All in all, if something of a formalist turn is underway in affect theory, How to Do Things with Affects [...] is an enriching volume that can serve as an introduction to that turn or an abundant development of it. - Stephanie Amon, Afterimage (2020) 47 (2): 93–96.
Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors Introduction: Mapping Affective Operations Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa PART 1 Triggering the Affects 1 Reading Irony through Affect: the Non-Sovereign Ironic Subject in C.P. Cavafy’s Diary Maria Boletsi 2 (An)Aesthetics of Affect: the Case of Hyper-Realism Pietro Conte 3 Relational Affect: Perspectives from Philosophy and Cultural Studies Jan Slaby 4 (Nearly) Nothing to Express : Horror : some Tread : a Toroid Eugenie Brinkema 5 Integrating Affect and Language: Essayism as an Affective Practice in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities Anne Fleig and Matthias Lüthjohann PART 2 Sensations, Resonances, and Transformations 6 Affective Disfigurations: Faceless Encounters between Literary Modernism and the Great War Tomáš Jirsa 7 Monstrous Resonances: Affect and Animated Pornography Susanna Paasonen 8 Reading for Affects: Francis Bacon and the Work of Sensation Ernst van Alphen PART 3 Affects as Triggers 9 Affectively Effective: Affect as an Artistic-Political Strategy Mieke Bal 10 Affect Is the Medium Christiane Voss 11 Et in Academia Ego: Affect and Academic Writing Bernd Herzogenrath 12 The Arab Spring’s Stranger: the Affective Media Phenomenon of The Girl in the Blue Bra Christina Riley 13 Affective Exchange in Portraiture: to Follow J. Jackie Baier into the Photographic Dissolve Eliza Steinbock Name Index
