Marco Abel

Assistant 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 History (ENG 213)

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 is forthcoming with the University of Nebraska Press in late 2007. I am currently researching contemporary German cinema (post-1990). A complete list of my publications can be found through my personal homepage @ http://www.unl.edu/marcoabel/. Some recent publications of mine on German cinema include:

• “The State of Things: More Images for a Post-Wall Reality--The 56th Berlin Film Festival.” Senses of Cinema 39 (April-June 2006). Access at www.sensesofcinema.com.
• “Images for a Post-Wall Reality: New German Films at the 55th Berlin Film Festival.” Senses of Cinema 35 (April-June 2005). Access at www.sensesofcinema.com.

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

• “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.