Mind the Gap! Towards a Transdisciplinary Theory of Aesthetic Negativity

Inspired by Viktor Shklovsky’s comments on the roles of negation and omission for artistic defamiliarisation, this chapter recapitulates a number of related core discourses on aesthetic negativity throughout the twentieth century and outlines ways in which these discourses could be integrated into a new transmedial theory framework. The idea that works of film, literature and art provide readers and viewers with “constitutive gaps”—to be “filled” by the recipient, who thereby participates in the construction of meaning—has been discussed in numerous approaches and medial contexts since the beginning the twentieth century, particularly in theories of reception and reader response. The chapter gives an overview of such approaches in film, art and literary theory, focusing (a) on the respective medial and aesthetic levels at which “gaps” are located, (b) on how the “interrupted positive” is constituted, which is explicitly or implicitly assumed in the theories, and (c) on how these approaches relate to defamiliarisation. The present contribution then suggests a broader transmedial treatment of aesthetic negativity, with a view to existing synergies with narratology, and discusses to what extent such a concept could successfully circumvent problems of other transmedial models.