What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light? Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.

Based on readings of some of the leading literary voices in contemporary Irish writing, this book explores how these authors have engaged with the events of Ireland's recent economic 'boom' and the demise of the Celtic Tiger period, and how they have portrayed the widespread and contrasting aftermaths. Drawing upon economic literary criticism, affect theory in relation to shame and guilt, and the philosophy of debt, this book offers an entirely original suit of perspectives on both established and emerging authors. Through analyses of the work of writers including Donal Ryan, Anne Haverty, Claire Kilroy, Dermot Bolger, Deirdre Madden, Chris Binchy, Peter Cunningham, Justin Quinn, and Paul Murray, author Eóin Flannery illuminates their formal and thematic concerns. Paying attention to generic and thematic differences, Flannery's analyses touch upon issues such as: the politics of indebtedness; temporality and narrative form; the relevance of affect theory to understandings of Irish culture and society in an age of austerity; and the relationship between literary fiction and the mechanics of high finance. Insightful and original, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction provides a seminal intervention in trying to grasp the cultural context and the literature of the Celtic Tiger period and its wake.

As an essential component of the ballast track, the ballast layer provides functionali-ties such as drainage, load distribution, as well as strength and stability for the rail-way track. The mechanical behaviors of ballast track such as its permanent settle-ment, breakage, force propagation and void ratio are in a great extent influenced by the form distribution of ballast stones. Its reasonable design will greatly improve the mechanical behaviors, and thus prolong the maintenance cycle of ballast track, or reduce the number of ballast stones needed for construction. This dissertation focuses on proposing optimized ballast stones in the ballast aggre-gate in regard to their geometrical forms. As the first step, a ballast random form gen-erator, which is designed to generate ballast form databases with different form dis-tributions, is proposed. 15 databases are created for further usage. Afterwards, Dis-crete Element Method (DEM) based simulations are performed to investigate the mechanical behaviors of ballast aggregates. The simulation model is established based on a box test, whose result is presented firstly. Establishment and calibration process of the model are expatiated afterwards. A parameter study regarding to cru-cial modeling parameters is also performed. Using the validated parameters and the 15 generated form databases, DEM simulation models with different form distribu-tions of ballast stones in the ballast aggregate are proposed. Simulative methods to quantify the mechanical behaviors are elaborated. Based on the obtained results, the interrelation between mechanical behaviors of ballast aggregate and the form effect on mechanical behavior of the ballast aggregates are studied. The optimized ballast aggregate is proposed based on the findings stated above. The proposed optimized ballast aggregate is expected to be a reference for construc-tion of ballast track in real world. The modeling technic and the calibrated modeling parameters can be used for optimization for different railway operating programs.