Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol

Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol presents a method and a model for improving the practice of criticism by bringing theories of affect to the specific study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics [...]
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Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol presents a method and a model for improving the practice of criticism by bringing theories of affect to the specific 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. Adam Frank 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. In analyzing and exploring these poetics and their motives in detail Frank unfolds those affect dynamics that are fundamental to experiences of composition, expression, group phenomena, thinking and learning, and self-care. Because it aims to account for the conceptual intimacy between theatricality and affect Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol will appeal to media and performance studies scholars as well as to readers and critics of American literature.Frank argues that the peculiar theatricality of the work of these four major artists can be understood in terms of a reciprocal relation between the bodily means of communicating affect (by face and voice) and technologies of graphic reproduction. The book's historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. In its various returns to television - as technology, as institution, as writing, as theater - this book seeks a loose, integrated approach to criticism across mediums of composition and performance.