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A Masocritical Engagement with Marco Abel's Theory of Violent Affect Wendy C. Hamblet Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 225 pp.
With his Violent Affect, Marco Abel opens a new era in the analysis of violent imagery in media and entertainment. Given the wealth of scholarship devoted to the subject of violence in film and literature, readers cannot help but approach this book under the conviction that there exists plentiful and valuable knowledge on the subject. Abel immediately disarms their confidence in the value of existing scholarship by raising a simple question that places in doubt previous investigations: What is a violent image?
Abel charges that the failure to problematize what a violent image is undermines the worth of the vast body of existing scholarship on images of violence in literature and cinema, and places in question the efficacy of those analyses for explaining how and why these images function. Previous scholarship simply assumes a direct representational linkage with reality: that violent images reflect real-life events. This foundational assumption both occludes the actual functions of violent images and causes scholars to fail to distinguish among differing kinds of violent images. It does not permit even the most basic of differentiations among violent images, for example, violence in animated films as opposed to violence in photographic realist films.
The assumption that violent images simply represent real life events of violence has oriented previous studies toward analyses of the images in terms of accuracy,, the replication of a thing or event that exists prior to the emergence of the image. Scholars have turned away from the fact of the actual violence affected by violent images to examine what these images signify or mean, what living truth they re-present. In sticking to this founding assumption, Abel understands previous scholars to be missing the point of the violent images, neglecting the crucial aspect of the work of the violent images-the experience evoked in the audience by submitting oneself to their reality.
For Abel, the problem is that these (at best, questionable; at worst, faulty) conclusions have had a vast effect upon our world....