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• Department of English
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• Marco Abel

Department of English

Marco Abel
Associate Professor

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Georgia State University, BA (1995)
• Pennsylvania State University, MA (1997)
• Pennsylvania State University, PhD (2003)

Professional areas of specialty

• Film Studies, with a specialty in Film Theory, European Cinema, and American Cinema
• Critical and Literary Theory, with a specialization in French post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School
• Contemporary American Literature, with a specialization in fictional expressions of violence

Courses regularly taught

• Film Theory (ENG 373)
• National Cinema (ENG 349)
• Studies in Film (ENG 913)
• Film Directors (ENG 239)

Personal Teaching Statement

I am particularly interested in theorizing images from what one might call an a-signifying perspective. Rather than assuming that images re-present a preexisting world against which we can measure and evaluate an image’s meaning, veracity, morality, and political viability, I approach images—cinematic or otherwise—from the idea, articulated by Jean-Luc Godard, that images are first and foremost “just images, not just images”: Images have force and do things, but they do not—at least not primarily—bear or represent meaning; images work by their constitutive intensities and affects rather than by re-presenting something in a way that may or may not be just or justified. Hence, the question to ask about images is less, “What does it mean?” than “How does it work?” and “What does it do?”

Selected Publications

My first book, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation was published by the University of Nebraska Press in late 2007. I am currently researching contemporary German cinema (post-1990). As part of this larger project I am currently writing a book entitled “The Berlin School: Towards a Minor Cinema,” for which Camden House has offered me a contract, with the book being due to be delivered in fall 2010. A complete list of my publications can be found through my personal homepage @ http://www.unl.edu/marcoabel.  Some recent or forthcoming publications of mine on German cinema include:

• "Underground Film Germany in the Age of Control Societies: The 'Cologne Group'." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27.2 (2010): 11,800 words ms.

• "Failing to Connect: Itinerations of Desire in Oskar Roehler's Post-Romance Films." New German Critique 109 (Winter 2010): 11,500 words ms.
• “Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold." The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2009: 10,000 words ms.
• A Cinema of Solidarity: An Interview with Andreas Dresen." Senses of Cinema 50 (April-June 2009): 16,000 words.
• "German Desire in the Age of Venture Capitalism." Yella (dir. Christian Petzold). DVD. The Cinema Guild (2009): 3,600 words.
• “Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the 'Berlin School'." Cineaste online 33.4 (Fall 2008): 7,800 words
• "The Cinema of Identification Gets on my Nerves: An Interview with Christian Petzold." Cineaste online 33.3 (Summer 2008): 12,600 words.

Prior publications on American Literature, Film, and Continental Theory include:

• “Intensifying Affect." Electronic Book Review, October 2008: 11,000 words.
• “Don DeLillo’s ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: Literature, Images, and the Rhetoric of Seeing 9/11.” PMLA 118.5 (October 2003): 1236-1250
• “Speeding Across the Rhizome: Deleuze Meets Kerouac On The Road.” Modern Fiction Studies 48.2 (! Summer 2002): 227-256.
• Judgment is not an Exist: Toward an Affective Criticism of Violence with American Psycho.” Angelaki 6.3 (December 2001): 137-154.

• “Fargo: The Violent Production of the Masochistic Contract as a Cinematic Concept.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16.3 (September 1999): 308-328.