"Contemporary culture is full of anxiety. But what happens when art, which usually purports to soothe us, actually disturbs us? What affective distortions do aesthetic experiences afford us when solace isn't the ultimate ambition? What happens when art fails, or when we fail to engage with art? When aesthetic experience negates the profound, verges on the automatic, and is troubled by dissonant feelings? Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life explores how the contemporary novel is increasingly shifting the way we think about art's effects on us to illuminate how novelistic mediations of and meditations on aesthetic experience are enriched by a paradoxical concern with the ineffability and inexpressibility of personal and communal losses or disasters. Reading alongside key practitioners in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Teju Cole, Jennifer Egan, Sheila Heti, Siri Hustvedt, Chris Kraus, Ben Lerner, and Zadie Smith, Alexandra Kingston-Reese suggests a rip away from contentment, comfort, and habit through five modes of against--as slant rhymes, afterimage, transcription, synaesthesia, and suspension--which capture not only affective dissonance, but formal experimentation"--
Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.
Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic.
Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.
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