Browse

How have poets writing in French reacted and adapted to cinema? This book answers with original analyses of over a century of remediation experiments among poets ranging from Mallarmé to Alferi, Hillel-Erlanger to Isou, and Cocteau to Damas and Gleize. ‘Cinepoetry’ names a disseminated but insistent practice of writing poetry under the inspiring warp of films, movie culture, the scenario form and cinema as actual or imaginary apparatus. Poets were struck by the essential feature of cinema--automorphosis—making it the first artificial form capable of reshaping itself like fluids and organic bodies. Far from marginal, cinepoetry forces us to reassess central tenets of modernism and the avant-garde, such as the inception of Surrealism and Lettrism, or the relation of Symbolism to visual technologies. Arguing that the mutation of the Romantic imagination into the ‘imaginary’ was hastened by cinepoetic thought, the book provides a new genealogy for poetry in the age of new media based on what is often lacking in remediation studies: close analyses of a large and diverse corpus of works, and the identification of a specific set of cross-medium operations. This book reconfigures key binaries within the interdisciplinary landscape of today's humanities: the canon and the margins, literature and cinema, text and image, close reading and post-technological hermeneutics, old vs. new media, prose poems vs. visual poems, text-based poetry vs. digital poetry. It also engages with the place of cinema in the thought of Jean Epstein, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault among others.

Building on both established and emerging discussions of literature and finance, Finance Fictions takes the measure of the tension between psychosis and realism in the contemporary finance novel. Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, this book considers that the twenty-first-century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of finance novel that in the face of an ongoing economic crisis, ever more frequent market crashes, and the politics of austerity, pursues a more realist approach to the actual workings of the economy. But what kind of realism would be attuned to today’s economic reality of high-frequency trading, dominated by complex financial instruments like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record? If Tom Wolfe in 1989 could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” it seems today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close-reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and lesser-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’s Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political.

What imaginaries, tropes, and media have influenced the way we theorize now? The Mark of Theory argues that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theory. The book understands inscription as a scene that takes place where and when a material surface is breached and forced to bear marks. As a trope that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints and phonographic grooves to marks on a page, inscription provides an imaginary that orients, governs, and irritates theoretical thought. By tracing inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century up to today, The Mark of Theory offers a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought. With its poststructuralist attention to figurative language and its media studies focus on objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation, this book works through core theoretical formations of poststructuralism, understanding them as a past legacy of a thought to come, as a prehistory of our current moment. By focusing on the ways in which theoretical works express, illustrate, and concretize their conceptual tenets, The Mark of Theory also reflects on the role of materiality and mediation in theory. As a theoretical tropology that takes the medium and materiality of metaphor seriously, it argues that different inscriptive practices and media imaginaries not only shape conceptual thought but that they determine representational politics and ethical choices.

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a mass media revolution in the widespread explosion of print; this book shows how the habits of consuming printed ephemera are still with us, even as pixels supersede paper. Trivial, disposable printed items, from temperance medals and cigarette cards to cartoons and even novels tell us much about nineteenth-century mediated experience, and our own. For a fresh perspective on media consumption, the book examines affect, a dynamic quality of human mind and body that links emotion to cognition, self to other, and self to environment. Affect shows how mass-mediated material began to dwell in the mind – less so the rational mind of egoistic cognition, than the embodied mind of daydreaming, reverie, and feeling. In such fugitive spaces, the sovereign individual gives way to community and inter-subjectivity as he or she recreates the social body. The book makes visible an array of positions, habitable by people of different classes, genders, ages, and sexualities, such as the mass live audience member, the enchanted viewer, the information “addict,” the self-fashioner, the collector, and the re-player of experience. These positions characterize an earlier moment in a genealogy of media consumption that endures today. The book describes them by putting disposable print forms into conversation with performance, visual culture, literary fantasy, and media theories. Demonstrating the recursive relations between affects and mass media, it reveals the cultural and psychological contours of ephemeral experience.

Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory to other memories of violence, especially those of colonialism. These works produced a “memory-in-complicity” that implicates different regimes of violence throughout history as well as different subject positions, such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity investigates the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.

The essays in Noir Affect articulate the importance of understanding negative affect and argue that noir is a privileged medium for doing so. Ranging, in its discussion, among a range of media and national contexts, the volume sees noir as a contemporary phenomenon as much as a historical one. Reconceptualized as defined by negative affect, noir becomes a crucial site for thinking about death, decay, anxiety, rage, sadness, guilt, shame, resentment, loss, and the erotic attachment to death. It also becomes a locus of protest and refusal against the boosterish rhetorics of capitalism. The essays in the book argue for the social and political work done by noir affect. Taken together, they make the argument for noir as a vibrant contemporary medium. They also make the argument for negative affect as a crucial political dynamic, one that is underappreciated in many theories of affect. Readers will emerge from the collection with a new understanding of both noir and affect.

This book brings theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. By exploring their transferential poetics, that is, the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, the author unfolds the affect dynamics fundamental to experiences of composition, expression, group phenomena, thinking and learning, and self-care. The book’s historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. The peculiar theatricality of these four artists can best be understood as a reciprocal framing relation between the bodily means of communicating affect (by face and voice) and technologies of graphic reproduction. In its various returns to television, as technology, as institution, as writing, as theater, this book offers a loose, integrated approach to criticism across mediums of composition and performance.