Trauma and Affect

A critical reexamination, through visual works, of two concepts that have suffused cultural studies

Published with vis-à-vis series.

Since the 1990s, the concepts "trauma" and "affect" have become increasingly important in the critique of art, literature and culture, acquiring currency across disparate disciplines such as gender studies, literature, postcolonial studies, sociology and even economics. Productive and intriguing in many ways, this turn has also resulted in major confusion, as the concepts' meanings have grown obscured from overuse.
In Trauma and Affect, literary scholar Ernst van Alphen examines the concepts through the lens of visual artworks and literature, drawing from many sources and domains. In the first half of the book, Alphen reexamines the origins of trauma theory in order to restore its critical power. In the second half, he discusses artists who develop strategies that process affect into critical making and thinking. Artists and writers discussed include Francis Bacon, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Félix González-Torres, Roni Horn, Steve McQueen and Andrew Wyeth, among many others.