Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature

Description

What happens when forms fall apart? And how do affects such as fear, shock, fascination, and desire drive and shape formal disturbances in modern literature, cinema, and contemporary art? Opening an interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect theory, media philosophy, and literary studies, Tomás Jirsa explores how specific affective operations disrupt form only to generate new formations. To demonstrate the importance of the structural work of mutually interacting affects, Disformations provides close readings of four intermedia figures stretched out across modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experiments-the faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and audiovisual works, from Vincent van Gogh and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner, to Francis Bacon, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Kosuth, and Jan Serých, this book opens up a new avenue for addressing how aesthetic forms desubjectify affects to mobilize their mediality and performative qualities. Jirsa's innovative theoretical framework and incisive readings offer a fresh inquiry into how artistic media produce their own figural thinking and in so doing compel us to think with them anew. Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Acknowledgments When Forms Fall Apart: An Introduction Disformations Open Form to New Formations Formal Disturbances Are Grounded in the Affective Operations that Rewrite Form Aesthetic Forms Think with and through Intermedia Figures Chapter 1: Facing the Faceless: Modernism, War, and the Work of Disfiguration Shattering the Face in Modernism Toward the Affective Work of the Formless Inflicting Wounds upon Language: Gueules Cassées Rewriting the Faceless Experience Chapter 2: Curves that Break the Frame: On the Relentless Absorption of the Wallpaper Pattern Nabokov’s Unruly Geometry of Wallpaper Rococo, or the Broken Frame Boredom, Fascination, and the Screen of Hallucination For a Morphological Reading of Gilman’s Wallpaper Between Excess and Absence: The Patterns of Madness Chapter 3: How Text Becomes Diatext: Gemini and Performativity of the Garbage Dump Speaking for Rubbish: Tournier’s Dandy Garbage Man versus Waste Studies The Media Archaeology of Garbage Reading a Figure, Trashing the Subject From Metatext to Diatext Chapter 4: The Portrait of Absence, or When the Empty Chairs Get Crowded Chairs without Sitters: Weiner, Kosuth, and the Missing Subject Tracing the Present Absence with van Gogh, Derrida, and Nancy Chairing Not Sharing, Shifting Not Sitting: A Media Swap in Ionesco’s The Chairs Decentered, Not Vanished Coda: Affective Compounds Make A Media Excess Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Coda Bibliography Index