This book explores the poetics elaborated from the 1840s to the 1980s by four American writers, thinkers, and artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. I have discerned in the work of these artists an acutely receptive and reflexive attention to the movement of feeling across and between text and reader, or composition and audience, and have therefore named the object of my studytransferential poetics. To help me describe and understand these transferential movements, I turn to several theories of affect that have entered literary criticism and the theoretical humanities in the past two decades,...

In this first chapter I will unfold the meanings of a phrase that I have found useful,the compositional aspect of affect in perception. This phrase combines a practical, everyday insight—that feelings matter for how we perceive things, people, ideas, other feelings—with the more technical insights of two theories of emotion: Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory and the object-relations theory of Melanie Klein and those who follow her. Writing on different sides of the Atlantic from within very different institutional, disciplinary, national, and continental contexts, Tomkins and Klein were nonetheless both influenced by and crucially departed from Freud’s writing,...

In a Jack Cole comic from November 1949 Plastic Man nearly meets his match.¹ The villain, hangdog-faced escaped criminal Phil Sanders, has gone straight and avoided the law for the past two years. Everything changes when he tries out for a theatrical role, rather minimally specified: the part of a sad character whose “facial expression must break hearts of audience.” The director finds that Sanders suits the part and coaches his expression slightly, until they both realize that his face can bring everyone around him to tears (fig. 2). Plastic Man’s sidekick, who happens to be at the same audition,...

How useful might it be to think of Henry James’sWhat Maisie Knew(1897) as a study in group psychology? The particular group I have in mind consists of all the characters in the novel who take on or are given the task of bringing its main character, Maisie, successfully to the end of her childhood. Ordinarily or normatively this would be the work of the family group, but the motivating interest of James’s plot is exactly the degree to which the members of Maisie’s immediate family, and later of her unusual extended one, are just not up to the...

This chapter begins with a scene of mixed audience response, not entirely unlike the response that greeted Henry James at the opening night of his playGuy Domville. The performance was Gertrude Stein’s delivery of the lecture “Plays” to a specially invited New York audience of fifty at an apartment on the Upper East Side on October 30, 1934. Having just stepped off the boat from Paris the week before, Stein had not yet adjusted to her new celebrity following the best-selling success ofThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published the year before. Seeking practice before her first official...

Here’s an observation: the most common twentieth-century North American slang words fortelevisionwere names for genitalia and other intimate body parts. The box, the tube, the boob tube—how to understand this sexualization of television? How better to understand it than in terms of what Melanie Klein called part-objects, those elements of infantile phantasy that refer, in the first instance, to the breast? “The part-object,” as Robert Hinshelwood explains, “is firstly an emotional object, having a function rather than a material existence”; it is, for the infant, what “touches his cheek, intrudes a nipple into his mouth for good...

Morton Feldman, the great mid-twentieth-century American (Brooklyn-born, Russian Jewish) composer whose music is as lush, spare, and quiet as his person was large, brash, and obnoxious, liked to tell a story about what he learned from the transplanted French composer Edgard Varèse. I take this story from a transcription of a seminar Feldman gave in Frankfurt in 1984:

I had one lesson on the street with Varèse, one lesson on the street, it lasted half a minute, it made me an orchestrator. He said, “What are you writing now, Morton?” I told him. He says, “Make sure you think about...