Silvan Tomkins Handbook

Adam J. Frank is professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and coeditor (with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Elizabeth A. Wilson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and author of Gut Feminism and Affect and Artificial Intelligence.

"Taking a cartographic approach to Silvan Tomkins’s considerable volumes of work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson extend the reach and significance of his theories of affect into new territories, problems, concepts, and tantalizing ways of approaching the ‘strange status of subjectivity.’ Unique, persuasive, and illuminating, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook is essential reading for advancing the field of affect studies beyond psychological individualisms of all kinds."-Lisa Blackman, author of Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science"Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson beautifully demonstrate the distinctiveness, suppleness, complexity, and generativity of Silvan Tomkins’s writings and concepts. The handbook makes vividly and urgently clear how much there remains, in the twenty-first century, to unearth and think through in relation to this distinctive twentieth-century psychologist and to models of affect and subjective experience more broadly."-Felicity Callard, University of Glasgow

• ContentsNote on QuotationsIntroductionPart I. Affect1. Drives 2. The Face3. Evolution4. Freedom5. The Positive6. The NegativeInterlude: Tomkins and SpinozaPart II. Imagery7. Images8. Theory, Weak and Strong9. Scenes and Scripts10. IdeologyInterlude: Tomkins and DarwinPart III. Consciousness11. Psychoanalysis at the Harvard Psychological Clinic12. Cybernetics13. The Psychology of Knowledge14. The Minding SystemAcknowledgmentsChronology of Tomkins’s Life and WorkBibliography of Tomkins’s Published WritingsReferencesIndex