Violent Affect

Marco Abel is an assistant professor of English and film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, Angelaki, Senses of Cinema, Modern Fiction Studies, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, among other publications.

• Preface Acknowledgments 1. The Violence of Sensation: Miller's Crossing, Affect, and Masocriticism 2. Judgment Is Not an Exit: Representation, Affect, and American Psycho 3. Are We All Arnoldians? A Conceptual Genealogy of Judgment 4. Serializing Violence: Patricia Highsmith's "Empirical" Pedagogy of Violence 5. Becoming-Violent, Becoming-DeNiro: Rendering Violence Visible on Screen 6. Don DeLillo's "In the Ruins of the Future": Violence, Pedagogy, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11 Notes Bibliography Index

"Violent Affect is a powerful and strikingly original work. Marco Abel poses the problem of violence in contemporary American culture and media in a unique and highly thoughtful way, opening up the question of a non-moralistic approach to violence: one that neither romanticizes and glorifies violence, nor condemns it in the easy terms of righteous indignation. He does this through close attention to the affect that is produced by the works under discussion, thus pushing the frontiers of contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Violent Affect should appeal to scholars in film studies, media studies, and contemporary social and aesthetic theory."-Steven Shaviro, author of Connected, or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society -- Steven Shaviro "A ground-breaking study... [Violent Affect] paves the way for new ways of discussing violent images in both art forms."-James R. Giles, South Atlantic Review -- James R. Giles South Atlantic Review "Literary and cinematic criticism will be greatly offended by Marco Abel's new theory of masocritical engagement, but it will also be affected. Further studies in the field of literary and cinematic criticism will be incapable of honest progress until they first address Abel's fundamental challenge to the founding assumptions of their methodology."-Wendy C. Hamblet, Theory & Event -- Windy C. Hamblet Theory & Event "Abel's book is a refreshing and much-needed intervention into the realm of visual culture."-Emma Radley, Scope -- Emma Radley Scope "The worth of Violent Affect lies in its stubborn refusal to regard criticism as an endgame... In a work that initially appears to retreat from judgment, the narrative ends on an ethical note, and one that politicians as well as cultural critics, might attend to."-Rosie White, Modern Fiction Studies -- Rosie White Modern Fiction Studies