Two decades after his essay on Silvan Tomkins (coauthored with Eve Sedgwick) helped precipitate theory's “affective turn,” Adam Frank has published a book that makes a persuasive case for the value of an affect-oriented criticism.Footnote ¹ Subtle, lively, and conceptually rich, Transferential Poetics is innovative in both its critical insights and its design. Frank attends to the role of affect in reading, thinking and composition in discussions of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein and Andy Warhol, arguing that these figures participate in a theatricalization of writing shaped by technologies of graphic reproduction. In five chapters, Frank elaborates how modern mass media – and television in particular – capture and indeed produce complex affective relationships, offering writers and artists new forms for framing thinking, feeling and the body.

While affect has been theorized in diverse fashions since Sedgwick and Frank's foundational essay, the most influential model has been a Deleuzian reading of affect as unqualified intensity, first popularized by Brian Massumi in an essay also published in 1995.Footnote ² Followers of Tomkins's distinct biologist theory of motivation have been far less numerous, but Frank's work sets about articulating the particular value of Tomkins's “phenomenologically rich, differentiated account of the affects” (5). Frank connects Tomkins's insights to those of object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her less well-known follower Wilfred Bion, a pairing that makes sense on the basis of these thinkers’ shared emphasis on relational complexity and on the qualitative aspects of affect. Indeed, pre-Frank and Sedgwick, Tomkins's work was most often encountered in an object-relations context. However, the book also interweaves readings of Michel Foucault and, perhaps most surprisingly, Jacques Derrida, on whom Frank draws to develop his discussion of the theatricalization of writing. In this respect, Transferential Poetics does not construct the turn towards affect and embodiment as a necessary turn away from the post-structuralist orthodoxies of late twentieth-century “theory” (a move evident in Massumi and indeed Frank's work with Sedgwick).

Frank's central notion of “transferential poetics”’ shares the insight that tends to unite affect theorists of all stripes: that affect is relational, and can be located in the movements and passages between bodies and states. His term is rooted in Klein's dynamic reworking of Freud's concept of transference and in Tomkins's theory of affect as a “hinge” which “acts both on and between bodies and operates at the interface of physiology and psychology” (7). Frank begins, in a chapter on Stein, Tomkins and Klein, by elaborating these exchanges between mind and body and author, reader and text, arguing that affect acts as a compositional force, motivating thinking and perception, and generating a confusion which can in itself be seen as productive. The theorization of affect as that located between rather than within implies a critique of depth models of emotion and informs Frank's larger connections between theatricality, performance and affect. However, Frank perhaps contributes most directly to affect theory's decoupling of feeling and interiority in chapter 2, in a reading of Poe, Tomkins and twentieth-century comic art. Here, rather than abandoning the language of “expression,” which, with its implications of a move from depth to surface, might appear incompatible with affect theory, Frank convincingly retools the term, via Tomkins's theory of the complex role of inhibition within the affect system, as a kind of pressing or “crowding out” (61): the amplification of terror in Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” inhibits or pushes out other affects, producing a shameless text (68).

Perhaps the most compelling – and original – aspect of Frank's fascinating book relates to his connections between affect, theatricality, and mass media technology. In his final three chapters, Frank explores the technical, institutional and social aspects of television for twentieth-century American poetics. “Integrated into ordinary domestic routines and living spaces,” Frank notes, “television offers multiplicity, simultaneity, and emotional complexity” (128). Frank's insights range from the claim that the “parlor scale” of Jamesian group intimacy explains why late James makes surprisingly good television to an understanding of Stein's nonmimetic, processual and transferential “landscape poetics” in terms of the “decomposition and recomposition” scanning techniques of television broadcast (116). Television features most centrally in the final chapter, where Frank argues not only that Warhol's poetics demonstrate a “televisual perspective on emotion,” but also that television becomes a therapeutic device by which Warhol can know and become himself “by regulating or tuning emotional perspective and distance” (120, 121).

The connections between Warhol and Stein, James and television, Poe and comic books, demonstrate how a focus on shared affective strategies might allow for the juxtaposition of different media and cultural forms without, as Frank puts it, “getting bogged down by distinctions between literary cultures and their others” (71). This non-dichotomizing style of juxtaposition accounts for Frank's method in a more structural, compositional sense: following Sedgwick's (Kleinian) strategies of “reparative” (as opposed to “paranoid”) reading, Frank does not seek to apply theory to text but rather sets works “beside” one another to “discover what kinds of readings and knowledges emerge” (20). This method is more or less pronounced in different chapters (chapter 2 feels like a more conventional application of Tomkins to Poe) but, at its most intense, produces a sort of kaleidoscopic effect, bringing into view suggestive local connections between ideas and texts. Frank's approach enables him to treat his theorists with as much care as his authors: he dwells, for instance, on the Jamesian contortions of Bion's prose. This method of besideness does not obscure Frank's series of sustained and cogent claims, but combines pleasure and complexity in manner akin to the objects of his study. This is a generous and inventive book and an important contribution to the fields of affect studies and modern poetics.