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Transferential Poetics presents a method for bringing 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. The author emphasizes the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, or composition and audience— their transferential poetics. 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, Frank argues, 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.
“This is an unusually original critical work, subtle in its appreciation of aesthetic and theoretical experimentation alike. It does what criticism should do: it exercises patience and practices openness, it amplifies the power of artistic and critical innovation, and it keeps faith with its reader.”
Subtle, lively, and conceptually rich, Transferential Poetics is innovative in both its critical insight and its design...This is a generous and inventive book and an important contribution to the fields of affect studies and modern poetics.
Paying attention is thus the hinge around which an affective poetics moves. Frank’s assertion—that we can get close to that force of feeling, should we be attentive enough—beckons the reader to lean forward and listen.
Adam Frank is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He co-edited, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, and he has written and produced two full-length recorded audiodramas.
