PUBLICATIONS
Books
In Print
Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Paperback reprint spring 2009.
Violence: most of us would be happy if we never had to experience it, and many are driven by the belief that nonviolent spaces exist. In Violent Affect, however, Marco Abel starts from a different, potentially controversial assumption: namely that violence is all-pervasive by ontological necessity. In order to work through the implications of this provocation, Abel turns to literary and cinematic works such as those by Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Harron, Patricia Highsmith, the Coen Brothers, and Robert DeNiro, contending that we do not even know what violent images are, let alone how they work and what they do. Countering previous studies of violent images based on representational and, consequently, moralistic assumptions, which, Abel argues, inevitably reinforce the very violence they critique, Violent Affect instead turns to the concept of “affect” as a means to explain how violent images work upon the world. Arguing for what he calls a “maso-critical” approach to violence, Abel’s analysis attends to the affects inherent to violent images with the goal of momentarily suspending judgment of them, thus allowing for new, unanswered critical questions about the issue of violence to emerge. Abel suggests that shifting from representational understandings of violence toward an account of its affective forces is a necessary step in developing more ethical tools to intervene in the world—for acting upon it for the betterment of the future..
- You can purchase the book directly through the UNP website as well as through websites such as Amazon.com.
- For reviews of the book, see
- Wendy C. Hamblet, "A Masocritical Engagement with Marco Abel's Theory
of Violent Affect," Theory & Event 12.2 (2009).
- In
her conclusion, she writes: "Abel's masocriticism is itself a
metaphysical experience, a magic that is worked upon the subject
to move her from her sense of reality in order to teach her lessons
about violence, not accessible from within the scholarly frame
of reference. 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 progres until
they first address Abel's fundamental challenge to the founding
assumptions of their methodology."
- Review is reprinted in Appraisal: The Journal of the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies 7.3 (March 2009): 56-57, as "Thinking 'Masocritically' about Violent Images and their Effect on Subjects."
- In
her conclusion, she writes: "Abel's masocriticism is itself a
metaphysical experience, a magic that is worked upon the subject
to move her from her sense of reality in order to teach her lessons
about violence, not accessible from within the scholarly frame
of reference. 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 progres until
they first address Abel's fundamental challenge to the founding
assumptions of their methodology."
- Emma Radley, Scope 14 (June 2009). She writes, "Abel elegantly outlines his methodology, managing to intelligently and insightfully set out an approach which side-steps the problem of the representative value of the violent image without reducing or diminishing the obvious strength of this level of meaning. His argument rarely veers towards the utopic, as is sometimes the case in Deleuzean-inflected criticism. The argument for paying attention to affect and sensation is highly persuasive, particularly in a contemporary culture which is constantly under assault by the visual. Abel makes a strong case for the relevance of Deleuze, and his claim for a critical approach informed by the synthesis of Deleuze and Adorno as a dynamic opposition to the more standard juxtaposition of Lacan and Hegel, or Derrida and Nietzsche, is extremely convincing, if a little underdeveloped in this particular study. [...] Abel's book is a refreshing and much-needed intervention into the realm of visual culture."
- James R. Giles, South Atlantic Review 74.2 (spring 2009).
- Rosie White, Modern Fiction Studies 56.2 (summer 2010): 466-468. In her conclusion she writes: "Surprisingly, 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" (468).
- Aaron Jaffe, symploke 18.1-2 (2010): 407-409.
- David Sterritt, Film Quarterly 64.4 (summer 2011): 73-75.
- Wendy C. Hamblet, "A Masocritical Engagement with Marco Abel's Theory
of Violent Affect," Theory & Event 12.2 (2009).
