How to Do Things With Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices

How 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, Tomás Jirsa, Matthias Lüthjohann, Susanna Paasonen, Christina Riley, Jan Slaby, Eliza Steinbock, Christiane Voss.

Ernst van Alphen, Ph.D. (1988), University of Utrecht, is Professor of Literary studies at the University of Leiden. His most recent books are Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-Practices (2018) and Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (2014).

Tomas Jirsa, Ph.D. (2012), Charles University, is Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Literature at Palacký University Olomouc. He has published books and articles on the relations between modern literature and the visual arts, media theory, and the affective aesthetics of music videos.