A New Radical Aesthetic

Armstrong, Isobel

doi:10.4324/9781315775883-10

Cited by 5 publications

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“…53 Isobel Armstrong tackles the caricatural idea that the aesthetic is 'unthought': rather, the interactive experience of art is potentially emancipatory, one in which 'the seductive power of affect […] is actually the limit-case of thought in erasure'. 54 What is more, the imputation that the aesthetic is conceptually naive (at best) must account for the way poststructuralists themselves generate flagrantly aesthetic and cerebral texts. 55 It is still valuable, then, to ask how style relates specifically to Kantian and neo-Kantian aesthetics and to wonder at the way it, too, can escape being subsumed under the ideological conformism of determinate form.…”

Section: Aestheticism and Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

The contemporary problem of style

Robinson

Sheils

2022

Textual Practice

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This essay sets the parameters of this special issue on the contemporary problem of style. Noting that the critical term style has returned to discursive prominence in recent years, the introduction explores the peculiarity of its status in literary studies. Asking how style underlies our critical practice today, it tracks the partially conflicting genealogies of style and the variety of its disciplinary relations. It explores the problem of style now: in its modernist inheritances; its association to class and nationality, especially Englishness; its reconfiguration through world Englishes and the global novel; its coupling with new aestheticism and new formalism; its recasting as a problem of receptivity and attachment in the era of 'post-critique'; its intimate connection to shame, affect and embodiment (given especial impetus by critical race theory and sexuality studies); and its persistent association with subcultures and the scandalous pleasures of 'lifestyle'. KEYWORDS new formalism; new aestheticism; modernism; weird English; stylistics; post-critique; shame Coleman, the protagonist of 'Prophets' (2021) by Brandon Taylor, teaches creative writing at Iowa. This information offers unusual sustenance to the student of contemporary style. It allows that Coleman's painful life predicaments are dependably enmeshed with the discourse of literary writing, that once privileged mode. Coleman feels personally rebuked by his students when they write 'stories in the forms of Spotify mixtapes, research articles, blog posts, found footage…'. And he finds himself affronted by the 'famous black writer' who has come to give a 'pyrotechnic' reading of 'experimental fiction that was really memoir but also a poem'.Coleman, too, is a black American writer, and gay, and he is harbouring a secret history of sexual abuse. 1 whiteness of a cultural space? In revealing this struggle to understand the impossible commitment to authenticity, suspicion of authorial self-exposure, wariness about the performance of identity and complicity with cultural capital, Taylor's story dramatises concerns germane to this special issue. The contemporary problem of style, we suggest, is a problem of sorting and identifying difference, of generational, technological and institutional transmission, of aesthetic judgment and affective response, of the interpretative tension between suspicion and pleasure, and of a creative practice in which historical content is constantly under erasure.The discourse of modern style has always opened a messy space between the literary and the extra-literary. Consider the German Romantic riposte to Kantian disinterest; or Nietzsche's reproval of the art-for-art's-sake movement; or the persistent failure of modernist impersonality to defend technique against life. Style comes and goes, but it always returns as a problem, in all its taxonomic unruliness, straddling disciplines and jumping between technocratic and journalistic modes. Recent work by Jacques Rancière, Rebecca Walkowitz,

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Section: Aestheticism and Stylementioning

confidence: 99%

The contemporary problem of style

Robinson

Sheils

2022

Textual Practice

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“…And so the dialectics of left and right converge in an unspoken consensus that is unable to engage with democratic readings. 25 In relying on an overly reductive caricature of art as a 'privileged realm' which exists at a non-cognitive remove beyond history, a 'politically committed' criticism is then unable to account for the persistence of art in anything other than reductively prescriptive and functionalist terms. Yet, if nothing else, the willingness of recent cultural theory to historicise and relativise a fixed or unified notion of art, itself indirectly attests to the refusal of artworks to be exhausted by a continual process of appropriation and counter-appropriation in an endless variety of contexts.…”

Section: The Anti-aestheticmentioning

confidence: 99%

The new aestheticism

Joughin¹,

Malpas²

2018

The New Aestheticism

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The new aestheticism: an introduction The very notion of the 'aesthetic' could be said to have fallen victim to the success of recent developments within literary theory. Undergraduates now pause before rehearsing complacent aesthetic verities concerning truth, meaning and value, verities that used to pass at one time for literary criticism. The rise of critical theory in disciplines across the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s has all but swept aesthetics from the map-and, some would argue, rightly so. Critical theory, of whatever variety, presented a fundamental challenge to the image of the old-style academic aesthete sitting in his (and it was always his) ivory tower and handing down judgements about the good and the bad in art and culture with a blissful disregard for the politics of his pronouncements. Notions such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art's intrinsic spiritual value have been successfully challenged by successive investigations into the historical and political bases of art's material production and transmission. Theories of textuality, subjectivity, ideology, class, race and gender have shown such notions of universal human value to be without foundation, and even to act as repressive means of safeguarding the beliefs and values of an elitist culture from challenge or transformation. The upshot of this series of interventions has been the rapid expansion of the canon, as well as a profound questioning of the very idea of canonicity. Art's relations to dominant ideologies have been exposed from a number of perspectives, as well as its potential to challenge these ideologies. What has frequently been lost in this process, however, is the sense of art's specificity as an object of analysisor, more accurately, its specificity as an aesthetic phenomenon. In the rush to diagnose art's contamination by politics and culture, theoretical analysis has tended always to posit a prior order that grounds or determines a work's aesthetic impact, whether this is history, ideology or theories of subjectivity. The aesthetic is thus explicated in other terms, with other criteria, and its singularity is effaced. Theoretical criticism is in continual danger here of throwing out the aesthetic baby with the humanist bathwater. Yet, on theoretical grounds alone, the recent resistance to aesthetics remains puzzling, not least insofar as many of the theoretical advances of the last few years-the focus on the reader's role in the constitution of meaning, the possibility that texts are

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“…We have simultaneously made our pick based on whether the examples have similarly grabbed the attention of the followers of “Men Write Women.” Our method is thus not one that seeks a representative sample, but rather one setting out to trace laughter, comedic rhythm, and timing in instances where individual tweets find resonance with the followers, highlighting moments of networked laughter. To select examples on the basis of such affective dynamics is likely not unusual in qualitative inquiry, even as it is rarely made explicit as a methodological alternative to more formal ways of sampling, given how affectation has been cast as being at odds with criticality (see Armstrong, 2000, p. 86–87). What “we” (as researchers and followers) find funny is a matter of taste that intersects with gender, class, ethnicity and geographic location (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We have tiny purses in our vaginas!!! #thanksforthat”: absurdity as a feminist method of intervention

Sundén

Paasonen

2021

QRJ

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PurposeAccording to thesaurus definitions, the absurd translates as “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous”; “extremely silly; not logical and sensible”. As further indicated in the Latin root absurdus, “out of tune, uncouth, inappropriate, ridiculous,” humor in absurd registers plays with that which is out of harmony with both reason and decency. In this article, the authors make an argument for the absurd as a feminist method for tackling heterosexism.Design/methodology/approachBy focusing on the Twitter account “Men Write Women” (est. 2019), the rationale of which is to share literary excerpts from male authors describing women's experiences, thoughts and appearances, and which regularly broadens into social theater in the user reactions, the study explores the critical value of absurdity in feminist social media tactics.FindingsThe study proposes the absurd as a means of not merely turning things around, or inside out, but disrupting and eschewing the hegemonic logic on offer. While both absurd humor and feminist activism may begin from a site of reactivity and negative evaluation, it need not remain confined to it. Rather, by turning things preposterous, ludicrous and inappropriate, absurd laughter ends up somewhere different. The feminist value of absurd humor has to do with both its critical edge and with the affective lifts and spaces of ambiguity that it allows for.Originality/valueResearch on digital feminist activism has largely focused on the affective dynamics of anger. As there are multiple affective responses to sexism, our article foregrounds laughter and ambivalence as a means of claiming space differently in online cultures rife with hate, sexism and misogyny.

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A New Radical Aesthetic

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The contemporary problem of style

The contemporary problem of style

The new aestheticism

“We have tiny purses in our vaginas!!! #thanksforthat”: absurdity as a feminist method of intervention

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