Instead, Kingston-Reese suggests that ‘depicting aesthetic experiences works to comfort and console, even when working in the shadow of the fresh wounds of global violence, environmental disaster, and personal suffering that provoke disturbances, both subtle and overt, to the novels’ aesthetic worlds’ (21). Yet these aesthetic experiences do not result in a rejection of political engagements – a charge often levied against autofiction. One aspect of this sincerity stems from a drive for ‘authentic experiences’, struggling against the ‘prevailing culture of anxiety about the direction of aesthetic experience in an era of hypercommodification’ (xiv). Even Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997), originally published by Semiotext(e), has enjoyed a twenty-first century renaissance through a series of new editions, and it functions as a precursor to post-millennial fixations with autofiction and its political efficacy.Ī fundamental claim of Contemporary Novelists posits that ‘recent self-reflexive American novels from the last ten years exhibit a mode of aesthetic sincerity that is less about parody and more about ethical authenticity’ (xiv). ![]() All but one of the novels analysed fit into the bracket of post-millennial production. The chapters are thematically led, covering novels by Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Kingston-Reese considers how these experiences are mediated through a series of ‘art-novels’, which reflect upon ways of seeing, reading, and feeling.Īcross five chapters, Contemporary Novelists explores how aesthetic experiences are ‘enriched by a paradoxical concern with the ineffability and inexpressibility of personal and communal losses or disasters’, and how these losses are amplified in works that draw on the ‘anxious tone of postmillennial artistic production’ (18). Contemporary Novelists illuminates the affective sense through which we experience ‘the aesthetic’ in our post-millennial present – the particular tempos and rhythms that insinuate the experiences of art into everyday life and vice-versa. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms’ (13).Īlexandra Kingston-Reese’s monograph, Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life ( 2020), is a compelling study that takes Lerner’s claims to task, tracing how contemporary novels ‘stage and critique aesthetic experience’, while also engaging with a ‘particular kind of ethics for the contemporary aesthetic subject’ (5). ![]() Lerner echoes this sentiment in the book-length essay The Hatred of Poetry ( 2016): ‘You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. The reality of these everyday encounters with artworks simultaneously strives towards and resists the possibility of ‘profundity’, as this experience is both informed and clouded by a critical language that obscures just as much as it elucidates. Gordon elaborates upon his own sense of detachment: ‘I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity’ (9). ![]() ![]() Lerner’s protagonist and doppelganger, Adam Gordon, worries that he might be incapable of such an experience, and is deeply suspicious of those who claim that poetry, music, or paintings have ‘changed their life’ (9). What does it mean, as Ben Lerner asks in Leaving the Atocha Station ( 2011), to have a ‘profound experience of art’? (9).
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