Abstract
This book deals with three different encounters of the subject with the formless (l'informe) and their consequences, as they appear in modern literature of the 19th and 20th century ( V. Nabokov, E.
Ionesco, R. Weiner, N.
V. Gogol, E.
A. Poe, G.
Leroux, Ch. Perkins Gilman and others).
The phenomenon of the formless is displayed between literary language, visuality, and affectivity and explored on the methodological background of aesthetics, philosophy and anthropology. Individual chapters of the book address the question of how a narrative text can capture, mediate and invent the phenomenon of the formless, so far perceived uniquely within visual arts, and explain the theoretical potential for aesthetics and literary studies of such an encounter.
Trying to answer these questions, one must analyze the means by which literary writing mediates the unnameable and creates something without a solid form. Rather than signifying an absence, a formal elimination or abstract reduction - as the term itself, along with certain avant-garde experiments might suggest - modern and postmodern art prove that the formless stands for an act of creative deformation, a dialectical process between the constitution of a form and its destruction, an event during which the textual and visual oscillates on the edge of the visible and invisible, the identifiable and unknown, the present and absent.
The formless is thus understood as an intermedial operation which, on the one hand, shapes and deforms the materiality of language, the narrative along with the images in a text, and on the other hand, provokes a radical metamorphosis of the depicted subject who comes across a formless element. Along with shaping the diegetic world, the performative and affective force of the formless affects the reader as well.
The formless is examined through its specific manifestations - epistemological and aesthetic figures, exceeding their contextual frames as well as verbal boundaries.