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

Flat Aesthetics explores the contemporary in American literature through the lens of object-oriented ontology and new materialisms, arguing that the contemporary is not preexisting objects or novels but an outcome of things' self-presentation in the present. It provides a cross-sectional reading of postmillennial American fiction, discussing works by Nicole Krauss, Michael Chabon, Ben Lerner, Colson Whitehead, and Emily St. John Mandel, which bear witness to the onset of a "flat" aesthetics in American letters after September 11, 2001.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 12 January 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Flat Aesthetics aims to gain a more nuanced and ontologically grounded understanding of contemporary American literature. While contemporaneity can be perceived as "our" period, Christian Moraru approaches the contemporary as something created by things themselves. The body of fictional prose under scrutiny here plays a significant role in the making of contemporaneity. In dialogue with object-oriented ontology and various new materialisms, Moraru argues that the contemporary does not preexist objects or the novels featuring them; rather, it is 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 offers a cross-sectional reading of postmillennial American fiction. The books discuss 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. The books are organized into five parts, each canvasing objectual constellations of contemporaneity shaped by material dynamics of language, museality and display, spatiality, zombification and thing-rhetoric, and post-anthropocentric kinship.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501355271