The Einstein Project The Poetics of Intermedial Spaces: Affect Modeling in Ann Quin, Claude Simon, and Alexander Kluge proceeds from the basic premise that literature is a particularly apt medium for observing how linguistic processes condense, encode and thus transform affects into feelings and emotion—and conversely, how they dissolve established cultural schemata of emotion.

The experimental narrative texts of Ann Quin (1936-1973), Claude Simon (1913-2005) and Alexander Kluge (*1932) lend themselves especially well to analyzing the affect-forming potential of new and unconventional literary techniques. In the 1970s Quin, Simon, and Kluge experimented—each in their own ways—with the narrative limits of the novel. Their formal experiments were oriented at discovering new intermedial relations in order to generate new forms of aesthetic experience. By showing the affective potential of experimental narrative texts, my project challenges the oft-expressed view that such texts tend to be too intellectual or artificial to generate sensual potency.