{"product_id":"flat-aesthetics-9781501355271","title":"Flat Aesthetics","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003emade\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e provides \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[The] borderline utopic reimagining of the aesthetic as a fully-fledged, situationist-infused apparatus of ‘de-perverting’ objects of all sorts, pushing them outside the fraudulent logic of the transactional and into the pristine domain of their ontological truth, renders \u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e commendable, as do its minutely conducted segments of flat reading. * Metacritic *\u003cbr\u003eDuring the past decade, objects and material culture have come to play an increasingly prominent role in literary and critical studies. Yet, there have been hitherto no significant attempts to assess whether this trend constitutes, in American fiction, a new literary and cultural movement worthy of the name. This is the question that Christian Moraru asks and answers in the affirmative in\u003ci\u003e Flat Aesthetics.\u003c\/i\u003e He demonstrates that the thematic focus on the object has been a consistent preoccupation of several important American novelists, with remarkable results. [...] [A] user-friendly theoretical text written in a clear, solid and assertive style that itself borrows the qualities of an (intransitive) object. A book worthy of celebration and study. * Philobiblon *\u003cbr\u003eChristian Moraru has been a preeminent theorist of the contemporary in literary studies. In previous studies, such as \u003ci\u003eCosmodernism\u003c\/i\u003e, he focused on the historical movement of the contemporary in the wake of the Cold War and after 9\/11 and emphasized its worldliness. In \u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e he turns to chart its distinctive aesthetic sensibility that shifts from a center on human subjectivity to one on the mutual existence of objects, human and nonhuman, yielding a flattened aesthetics. Engaging Object-Oriented Ontology, he shows how this aesthetics runs through work by authors that have become prominent since 2000, such as Mohsin Hamid, Ben Lerner, Emily St. John Mandel, and Colson Whitehead. For Moraru, the contemporary finally is less a period than a sense of existence and an object itself. * Jeffrey Williams, Professor of English, Carnegie Mellon University, USA *\u003cbr\u003eBristling with ideas and insights, \u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e sets in motion an exhilarating aesthetic of 'flat reading' focused on the displays, the energies, and the relations of things. Extending his previous investigations of the postmodern, Christian Moraru explores the formation of an epoch and a form that he calls the contemporary, a post-postmodern temporality in which the world of things comes into its own. * John Frow, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Sydney, Australia *\u003cbr\u003eAfter a century or more of deep reading, the time is ripe, says Christian Moraru, for a turn to \u003ci\u003eflat \u003c\/i\u003ereading – reading that 'screens literary prose for objects,' that explores these objects in themselves and in their ensembles, and that seeks to level the playing-field on which objects interact with humans and other beings. Moraru theorizes flat aesthetics, but even more valuably he models its practice in arresting, exhilarating readings of a series of post-millennial American novels by Ben Lerner, Emily St. John Mandel, Colson Whitehead, Nicole Krauss, and others.  If you are curious about what comes after postmodernism in fiction,  and dissatisfied with the alternatives that have been proposed so far, then \u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics \u003c\/i\u003eis the place to start. * Brian McHale, Professor Emeritus of English, The Ohio State University, USA, and author of Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015) *\u003cbr\u003eThis effervescent book, at once a broad-based mapping of contemporary American literature and a finely calibrated weave of concepts and objects, gives us a ‘now’ opaque in its very flatness, elusive because so encompassingly near. * Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival (2020) *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIntroduction: The New Aesthetic, the Contemporary, and Compositional Criticism\u003c\/b\u003e Flat Aesthetics: Things, Forms, and Exchange Regimes Flat Reading: Object Tangles and Criticism without \"Us\" Contemporaneity, Periodization, and the Signature of the Present \u003cb\u003ePart I. Language\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003ecap'n crunch, planet of the apes, the kingfishers: \u003c\/i\u003eBen Lerner and the Uselessness of Poetry \u003ci\u003enecklaces, novels, backpacks: \u003c\/i\u003eA Post is Being Formed in \u003ci\u003eLeaving the Atocha Station\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003ebees, parrot, trains\u003c\/i\u003e: Murder by Numbers and \"the Foulest of Crimes\" in \u003ci\u003eThe Final Solution\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart II. Display\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003efreighters, snow globes, comics:\u003c\/i\u003e Mandel's Museum of Civilization, or Survival Is Insufficient \u003ci\u003ephotographs, instant coffee, baby octopuses: \u003c\/i\u003e\"Mere Objecthood,\" Messianic Readymates, and the Institute of Totaled Art in \u003ci\u003e10:04\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart III. Exit\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003ego, dog. go! scuba diving, massage chairs: The Dog,\u003c\/i\u003e X\/It-Men, and Other Things That Go \u003ci\u003eravann, doors, cell phones: \u003c\/i\u003eUn-Telling, \"Mocking Objects,\" and Hamid's \u003ci\u003eExit West\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart IV. Revenant\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003ecopula, ding, assembly: \u003c\/i\u003eZombies and the Body Politics \u003ci\u003ecorsica, dust, skels: \u003c\/i\u003eThe Insistence of Things and the Object of Race in Whitehead's \u003ci\u003eZone One\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003ePart V. Kinship\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003efish, peacock, ram: \u003c\/i\u003eSchulz, Blecher, Foer, and Kafka's Unknown Family \u003ci\u003ehilton, suitcase, ein-sof: Forest Dark \u003c\/i\u003eand the Machine of Jewish Literature \u003cb\u003eConclusion: Composing the Contemporary\u003c\/b\u003e  \u003ci\u003eNotes\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eBibliography  Index\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Publishing Plc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49531380859223,"sku":"9781501355271","price":999.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781501355271.jpg?v=1731882880","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/flat-aesthetics-9781501355271","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}