Shifting the focus from human interiority toward the agency of cultural objects, social arrangements and aesthetic matter, How to Do Things with Affects examines the affective operations and transmissions triggered by various aesthetic forms, media events and cultural practices.

Notes on Contributors Introduction: Mapping Affective Operations  Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa PART 1 Triggering the Affects 1 Reading Irony through Affect: the Non-Sovereign Ironic Subject in C.P. Cavafy’s Diary  Maria Boletsi 2 (An)Aesthetics of Affect: the Case of Hyper-Realism  Pietro Conte 3 Relational Affect: Perspectives from Philosophy and Cultural Studies  Jan Slaby 4 (Nearly) Nothing to Express : Horror : some Tread : a Toroid  Eugenie Brinkema 5 Integrating Affect and Language: Essayism as an Affective Practice in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities  Anne Fleig and Matthias Lüthjohann PART 2 Sensations, Resonances, and Transformations 6 Affective Disfigurations: Faceless Encounters between Literary Modernism and the Great War  Tomáš Jirsa 7 Monstrous Resonances: Affect and Animated Pornography  Susanna Paasonen 8 Reading for Affects: Francis Bacon and the Work of Sensation  Ernst van Alphen PART 3 Affects as Triggers 9 Affectively Effective: Affect as an Artistic-Political Strategy  Mieke Bal 10 Affect Is the Medium  Christiane Voss 11 Et in Academia Ego: Affect and Academic Writing  Bernd Herzogenrath 12 The Arab Spring’s Stranger: the Affective Media Phenomenon of The Girl in the Blue Bra  Christina Riley 13 Affective Exchange in Portraiture: to Follow J. Jackie Baier into the Photographic Dissolve  Eliza Steinbock Name Index