I experienced many mind-changing transferential relations, with individuals, groups, and institutions, while writing this book. It gives me real pleasure to acknowledge some of them here.
First, Michael Moon read this entire manuscript and offered invaluable feedback, advice, and encouragement along the way. I am deeply grateful to him for his intellectual and emotional support, acuity, practically infinite resources, and the many enjoyable conversations we have had about affect, literature, music, and media over the years. I look forward to many more. Michael, along with Elizabeth Wilson and Jonathan Goldberg, invited me to present parts of this project at Emory University. Thanks to Liz, my main interlocutor on all things Tomkins, and to Jonathan, who read and responded to my last writing for this book, for their love and friendship. Thanks as well to audiences at Emory for helpful questions and suggestions,
Anna Gibbs and Jennifer Biddle gave me the chance to share some of my earliest work on this project at the symposium Affect at the Interface, which took place in Sydney in June 2008. Thanks to the participants in that event as well as its sponsors, the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney and the Center for Contemporary Art and Politics at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. I am grateful to Fiona Brideoake for arranging my talk on Warhol at the University of Melbourne. And, once again, I am very grateful to Liz Wilson, both for being a great host in Sydney and for taking such good care of me when my back went out.
I am grateful to colleagues for invitations to present talks at various venues: the Science Studies Colloquium at the University of California, San Diego; the symposium Contemporaneities of Gertrude Stein held at the Université du Québec à Montréal; the workshop Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art and Culture held at the University of British Columbia; and others. I am grateful to the audiences who heard and responded to my work, including those at meetings of the Modernist Studies Association, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the American Comparative Literature Association.
Thanks to the University of British Columbia for funding the sabbatical leave that let me complete this book and for providing a usable cross-disciplinary environment for intellectual work. In particular, I am grateful to the following colleagues for reading and responding to my writing or otherwise providing vital intellectual and moral support: Robert Brain, Alex Dick, Christina Lupton, Kevin McNeilly, Miguel Mota, Alan Richardson, Sandy Tomc, and Mark Vessey. I would also like to thank those students who were game to think with me about affect theory and literary/media criticism in several courses over the years, especially Natalie Forssman, Aaron Goldsman, Kate Hallemeier, Matt Hiebert, Sean McAlister, Ada Smailbegoviç, and Kate Stanley.
I wrote the final parts of this book during a sabbatical year in Montréal. I am grateful to Paul Yachnin and the McGill University English Department for providing library use and an office. Ned Schantz made a good year in Montréal even better by providing stimulating conversation (now ongoing) about movies, television, and criticism. I am also grateful to Marcie Frank for inviting me to speak to the English Department at Concordia University.
Jonathan Elmer and Lisa Cartwright read my manuscript for Fordham University Press and offered helpful, generous feedback. I tried to follow the advice of both readers, who suggested that I make more of this project’s intervention into media studies. Thanks too to Thomas Lay and the late, grievously missed, Helen Tartar at Fordham for editorial support. Greg Pierce at the Andy Warhol Museum, Gary Groth at Fantagraphics, and the staff at DC Comics helped to secure permissions for reproducing the images in this book. Two journals gave me permission to reprint my earlier writing. Chapter 2 is a revised version of “Medium Poe,” which appeared in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 48, no. 2 (2006). Copyright © 2007 Wayne State University Press. Used with the permission of Wayne State University Press. Chapter 4 is a revised version of “Loose Coordinations: Theater and Thinking in Gertrude Stein,” which appeared in Science in Context 25, no. 3 (2012). Used with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
The thinking that made writing this book possible developed most intensively in the company of a number of individuals and their creative work. Steven Meyer’s writing on Gertrude Stein has increased my capacity to enjoy and understand her work, and I have learned enormously from our many conversations about Stein, James, Whitehead, varieties of empiricism, and the history of literary criticism, in coffee shops, restaurants, and museums across North America. Sam Shalabi introduced me to the music and writing of Morton Feldman. I thank him for that and for twenty years (give or take) of conversations about music, politics, philosophy, work and play, ageing, family, and other things. I became thoroughly acquainted with the nitty-gritty of object relations in the company of Dr. Elie Debbané, and for this experience I continue to entertain a complicated feeling of gratitude and chagrin. As for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who passed away in 2009, this book would simply not have taken the shape it has without her presence in my life. I continue to be grateful to Eve for introducing me to Tomkins, Klein, and ways of thinking and feeling that try to make the most of how these are always intertwined. Thanks too to Hal Sedgwick for his unflagging commitment to Eve’s work.
My sisters, Marcie and Jill Frank, have always been there with love and advice. In fact Marcie got me into this business in the first place. I doubt she remembers a long conversation we had on an airplane more than twenty-five years ago, but that’s what got me started on my gradual slide toward criticism. I am very grateful to her for this conversation and the many others, both personal and professional, we have had since and continue to have.
I am grateful to my parents for so many things, especially for their emotional and financial support over the years and for the value they placed on curiosity, vitality, and emotional honesty. My father, Hershie Frank, passed away after a long illness not long before I completed this book. I have learned to appreciate his directness, stubbornness, considerable mental energy, and what I now think of as his finely tuned bullshit detector; I hope I brought some of these qualities to the writing in this book. I am very grateful to my mother, Esther Frank, for her love, friendship, and open mind.
Finally, Marguerite Pigeon has given me a chance to experience more enjoyment than I ever thought possible. I am most grateful to her, and to the little group that we are making together: Merle, and now the new one, Lewis. To Marguerite, Merle, Michael, Marcie, and my mother (and a few more Ms thrown in beside), I have dedicated this book.