Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens

The book "Semi-Detached" explores the aesthetic encounter with semi-detachment through literature and art, examining how artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place. It focuses on Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who understood their work as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 360 pages
Publication date: 27 February 2024
Publisher: Princeton University Press

When we immerse ourselves in a work of art, what happens to the other half of us that remains outside of its grasp? Semi-Detached explores this intriguing state of being, where we exist both within and without our social and physical surroundings, engaging and drifting apart, and how it shapes our perceptions of aesthetics. This book argues that the allure of many contemporary aesthetic experiences lies in their ability to provoke and provide pathways for making sense of this oscillating, in-between space. John Plotz delves into the works of Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who recognized their creations as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience.

The book begins with the decline of the romantic tale and the rise of realism, as well as John Stuart Mills' ideas about social interaction and subjective perception. Plotz examines Pre-Raphaelite paintings that depict semi-detached states of attention, as well as novels that treat provincial subjects as simultaneously peripheral and central. He discusses how realist writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James demonstrate how consciousness can exist in multiple places simultaneously; how William Morris' work showcases the shifting forms of semi-detachment in print and visual media; and how Willa Cather created a form of modernism that bridged aesthetic dreaming and reality.

Plotz concludes with a look at early cinema and the works of Buster Keaton, who found remarkable ways to portray semi-detachment on screen. In a world where cyberdependency and virtual realms dominate our attention, Semi-Detached offers a historical and critical exploration of the halfway-thereness that audiences have long understood and experienced. It sheds light on the ways in which art and literature have captured and interpreted this elusive state of being, and how it continues to shape our understanding of aesthetics in the modern age.

Dimension: 235 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780691259277