Disformations

Tomáš Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Interested in relations between literature and the visual arts, affect studies, and music video, he recently co-edited (with Ernst van Alphen) How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices (2019). In 2015 and 2017, he was awarded a fellowship from IKKM in Weimar; in 2019, he was Visiting Scholar at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsWhen Forms Fall Apart: An IntroductionDisformations Open Form to New FormationsFormal Disturbances Are Grounded in the Affective Operations that Rewrite FormAesthetic Forms Think with and through Intermedia FiguresChapter 1Facing the Faceless: Modernism, War, and the Work of DisfigurationShattering the Face in ModernismToward the Affective Work of the FormlessInflicting Wounds upon Language: Gueules Cassées Rewriting the Faceless ExperienceChapter 2 Curves that Break the Frame: On the Relentless Absorption of the Wallpaper PatternNabokov’s Unruly Geometry of WallpaperRococo, or the Broken FrameBoredom, Fascination, and the Screen of HallucinationFor a Morphological Reading of Gilman’s WallpaperBetween Excess and Absence: The Patterns of MadnessChapter 3 How Text Becomes Diatext: Gemini and Performativity of the Garbage DumpSpeaking for Rubbish: Tournier’s Dandy Garbage Man versus Waste StudiesThe Media Archaeology of GarbageReading a Figure, Trashing the SubjectFrom Metatext to DiatextChapter 4 The Portrait of Absence, or When the Empty Chairs Get CrowdedChairs without Sitters: Weiner, Kosuth, and the Missing SubjectTracing the Present Absence with Van Gogh, Derrida, and NancyChairing Not Sharing, Shifting Not Sitting: A Media Swap in Ionesco’s The ChairsDecentered, Not VanishedCoda: Affective Compounds Make a Media ExcessNotesBibliographyIndex

Through a series of intriguing examples from literature, cinema, and contemporary arts, Jirsa’s book takes readers on a delightful cross-disciplinary journey into affectively driven generative deformations. Passionate and erudite, Disformations’s claim about the performative force of affects will be much debated in the contemporary media theory.