Affective Disfigurations: Faceless Encounters between Literary Modernism and the Great War

Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F61989592%3A15210%2F19%3A73592659" target="_blank" >RIV/61989592:15210/19:73592659 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004397712_008" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004397712_008</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004397712_008" target="_blank" >10.1163/9789004397712_008</a>

Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Affective Disfigurations: Faceless Encounters between Literary Modernism and the Great War
Original language description
What happens when a human face begins to lose its familiar form, falls apart, becomes an uncanny, formless object? And how can language mediate such a brutal experience? Shifting from an affective ontology of the face towards the affective operations of the faceless, this essay examines, through both historical and aesthetic experiences, several encounters between subjects and disfigured faces that took place during the second decade of the twentieth century. Drawing on the war experiences of the gueules cassées—the term given to the survivors of World War I who suffered extensive facial injuries—and several modernist texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux and Richard Weiner, I argue that far from merely provoking horror, shock, disgust or fascination, the faceless image operates both in literature and the visual arts as a figure, embracing on the one hand the aesthetics of the ‘formless’ and on the other the traumatizing experience of war. Placing the relational and formalist approaches to affect in dialogue with each other, the formless is explored as an affective operation based on the generative deformation of forms, triggering latent experiences in all those who encounter it.
Czech name
—
Czech description
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Project
—
Continuities
I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year
2019
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name
How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices
ISBN
978-90-04-39769-9
Number of pages of the result
22
Pages from-to
121-142
Number of pages of the book
279
Publisher name
Brill Academic Publishers
Place of publication
Leiden
UT code for WoS chapter
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