This study explores the tension between the anti-aesthetic emphasis of post-modern and contemporary literary theory on the one hand, and readers’ engagements with the aesthetic on the other hand. The book draws on recent work in cognitive and neurological science, evolutionary psychology, and the emerging field of cognitive narratology to create a new theory for understanding readers’ aesthetic experiences when reading 20th- and 21st-century global fiction. The book examines works by many writers, including Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy, Arundhati Roy, and Jeanette Winterson. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Eternalized Fragments explores the implications of treating literature as art&;examining the evolving nature of aesthetic inquiry in literary studies, with an eye to how twentieth- and twenty-first-century world fiction challenges our understandings of form, pleasure, ethics, and other critical concepts traditionally associated with the study of aesthetics.
Since postmodern and contemporary fiction tend to be dominated by disjunctures, paradoxes, and incongruities, this book offers an account of how and why readers choose to engage regardless, articulating the cognitive rewards such difficulties offer. By putting narrative and philosophical approaches in conversation with evolutionary psychology and contemporary neuroscience, W. Michelle Wang examines the value of attending to aesthetic experiences when we read literature and effectively demonstrates that despite the aesthetic&;s stumble in time, our ongoing love affair with fiction is grounded in our cognitive engagements with the text&;s aesthetic dimensions.
Drawing on a diverse range of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy,Cormac McCarthy, Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer Egan, Italo Calvino, Flann O&;Brien, and Alasdair Gray, Eternalized Fragments lucidly renders the aesthetic energies at work in the novels&; rich potentialities of play, the sublime&;s invitation to affective renegotiations, and beauty&;s polysemy in shaping readerly capacities for nuance.
Explores the implications of treating literature as art by putting narrative and philosophical approaches in conversation with cognitive science.
