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Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary

Christian Moraru

0/5 ( ratings)

Flat Aesthetics is literary-historical and critical-theoretical study that deals chiefly with post-1990 American fictional prose. It discusses in depth a whole cross-generational spectrum of multiracial and multiethnic U.S. authors, including later Don DeLillo, Chang-rae Lee, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Ben Lerner, Joseph O'Neill, Helen DeWitt, Steve Tomasula, Gina Ochsner, Arthur Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid, and Colson Whitehead.

"Apr�s-Garde", a phrase that is traceable to David Foster Wallace's 1996 1079-page encyclopedic meganovel Infinite Jest, encapsulates Christian Moraru's core claims about post-1990 American literature. A play on avant-garde and the less frequent arri�re-garde, Moraru argues that Wallace's neologism captures an aesthetic that is grounded-quite polemically in the "post-truth" era of manipulatory hyperrelativism and populist demagoguery-in values, ideas, and desires centered on the pivotal concept and manifestations of presence. Whether this is a political event, a scientifically proven fact, or an environmental catastrophe affecting life on our planet, these cases strike us as present and incontrovertibly "in your face," true, certain, and undeniable in their raw existence. Moraru calls this aesthetic, accordingly, an aesthetic of presence, and proposes that it undergirds an entire literary modality that systematically and programmatically performs, seeks literary, cultural, and political change, and ultimately breaks fresh ground by paradoxically coming apr�s, "after."

Pages: 288

Format: Hardcover

ISBN: 1501355279

ISBN 13: 9781501355271

Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary

Christian Moraru

0/5 ( ratings)

Flat Aesthetics is literary-historical and critical-theoretical study that deals chiefly with post-1990 American fictional prose. It discusses in depth a whole cross-generational spectrum of multiracial and multiethnic U.S. authors, including later Don DeLillo, Chang-rae Lee, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Ben Lerner, Joseph O'Neill, Helen DeWitt, Steve Tomasula, Gina Ochsner, Arthur Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Mohsin Hamid, and Colson Whitehead.

"Apr�s-Garde", a phrase that is traceable to David Foster Wallace's 1996 1079-page encyclopedic meganovel Infinite Jest, encapsulates Christian Moraru's core claims about post-1990 American literature. A play on avant-garde and the less frequent arri�re-garde, Moraru argues that Wallace's neologism captures an aesthetic that is grounded-quite polemically in the "post-truth" era of manipulatory hyperrelativism and populist demagoguery-in values, ideas, and desires centered on the pivotal concept and manifestations of presence. Whether this is a political event, a scientifically proven fact, or an environmental catastrophe affecting life on our planet, these cases strike us as present and incontrovertibly "in your face," true, certain, and undeniable in their raw existence. Moraru calls this aesthetic, accordingly, an aesthetic of presence, and proposes that it undergirds an entire literary modality that systematically and programmatically performs, seeks literary, cultural, and political change, and ultimately breaks fresh ground by paradoxically coming apr�s, "after."

Pages: 288

Format: Hardcover

ISBN: 1501355279

ISBN 13: 9781501355271

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