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 Figures
Acknowledgements

When Forms Fall Apart: An Introduction
Disformations Open Form to New Formations
Formal Disturbances Are Grounded in the Affective Operations that Rewrite Form
Aesthetic Forms Think with and through Intermedia Figures

Chapter 1
Facing the Faceless: Modernism, War, and the Work of Disfiguration
Shattering the Face in Modernism
Toward the Affective Work of the Formless
Inflicting Wounds upon Language: Gueules Cassées
Rewriting the Faceless Experience

Chapter 2
Curves that Break the Frame: On the Relentless Absorption of the Wallpaper Pattern
Nabokov’s Unruly Geometry of Wallpaper
Rococo, or the Broken Frame
Boredom, Fascination, and the Screen of Hallucination
For a Morphological Reading of Gilman’s Wallpaper
Between Excess and Absence: The Patterns of Madness

Chapter 3
How Text Becomes Diatext: Gemini and Performativity of the Garbage Dump
Speaking for Rubbish: Tournier’s Dandy Garbage Man versus Waste Studies
The Media Archaeology of Garbage
Reading a Figure, Trashing the Subject
From Metatext to Diatext

Chapter 4
The Portrait of Absence, or When the Empty Chairs Get Crowded
Chairs without Sitters: Weiner, Kosuth, and the Missing Subject
Tracing the Present Absence with Van Gogh, Derrida, and Nancy
Chairing Not Sharing, Shifting Not Sitting: A Media Swap in Ionesco’s The Chairs
Decentered, Not Vanished

Coda: Affective Compounds Make a Media Excess

Notes
Bibliography
Index