Forms of the Affects

Eugenie Brinkema is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects is overflowing with words that splice subjects together in numerous, thrilling combinations. . . .Brinkema’s use of language... brilliantly materialises the book’s central thesis." - Tom Hastings (Review 31) “[Brinkema’s] first book restores affect as a theoretical site of limitless possibility rather than the term of interpretive foreclosure it has largely become. The Forms of the Affects is a tantalizingly ambitious contribution to affect theory that may even prove sui generis as affective film studies turns over a new leaf of close reading.” - Stephanie Amon (Afterimage) “Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, researchers.” - R. B. Wise (Choice) "[A] bold corrective to affect scholarship in film studies . . . as challenging theoretically as it is delightful and useful formally. It models freedom and ingenuity in its extraction of form out of intellectual history on emotions, etymology, and even culinary knowledge, and in its patient and playful reading of film." - Alina Haliliuc (Film Criticism) "Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects is an innovative book that will surely be of great interest to scholars of affect and film studies in particular, but the possibilities for her method will also be useful to those in visual studies, literary, feminist, and queer theory, philosophy, and cultural studies more broadly."  - Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst (Reviews in Cultural Theory) "To anyone interested in questions of form and affect, this important book is sure to generate discussion for some time to come.... Reading this book is, dare I say it, an exhilaratingly affective experience." - Jennifer Peterson (Film Quarterly) "The Forms of the Affects is a beautifully written, complex text that weaves together visual and temporal forms drawn from film and literature with the affects grief, disgust, anxiety and joy." - Dylann M. McLean (Emotion, Space and Society)

• Preface. Ten Points to Begin xi1. A Tear That Does Not Drop, But Folds 2. Film Theory's Absent Center Interval. Solitude 3. The Illumination of Light 4. Grief and the Undialectical Image 5. Aesthetic Exclusions and the Worse than the Worst 6. Disgust and the Cinema of Haut Goût Interlude. Formalism and Affectivity 7. Intermittency, Embarrassment, Dismay 8. Nothing/Will Have Taken Place/But the Place: Open Water Anxiety 9. To Begin Again: The Ingression of Joyful Forms Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index