Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary by Moraru, Christian

Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781501355271)

Vendor: Christian Moraru
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$130.00
$130.00
$130.00
Subtotal: $130.00
Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary by Moraru, Christian

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

$130.00
Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary by Moraru, Christian

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

$130.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
x

Flat Aesthetics seeks to secure a more granular and ontologically demotic handle on the contemporary in American literature. While contemporaneity can be viewed as "our" period, Christian Moraru approaches the contemporary as some-thing made by things themselves. The making of the contemporary is variously restaged by the body of fictional prose under scrutiny here. Thus, this corpus itself participates in the making of contemporaneity.

In dialogue with object-oriented ontology and various new materialisms, Moraru contends that the contemporary does not preexist objects or the novels featuring them; it is not their background but an outcome of things' self-presentation. As objects, beings, or existents present themselves in the present, in our "now," they foster thing-configurations that together compose the form of, and essentially make, the contemporary - the present's cultural-material signature, as Moraru calls it.

To decipher this signature, Flat Aesthetics provides a cross-sectional reading of postmillennial American fiction. Discussed are solely post-2000 works by writers who have also established themselves over the past two decades or so, from Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, and Ben Lerner to Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel. Their output, Moraru claims, bears witness to the onset of a "flat" aesthetics in American letters after September 11, 2001. Organized into five parts, the books canvases objectual constellations of contemporaneity shaped by material dynamics of language, museality and display, spatiality, zombification and thing-rhetoric, and post-anthropocentric kinship.

Author: Christian Moraru
ISBN-10: 1501355279
ISBN-13: 9781501355271
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Language: English
Published: 01/12/2023
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d
By Christian Moraru
By Christian Moraru
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Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. He is the author of eight books, including Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015) and Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011). He is the editor or co-editor of five books, including Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (2015).

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