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The years after World War Two have seen a widespread fascination
with the free market. In this book, Michael W. Clune considers this
fascination in postwar literature. In the fictional worlds created
by works ranging from Frank O'Hara's poetry to nineties gangster
rap, the market is transformed, offering an alternative form of
life, distinct from both the social visions of the left and the
individualist ethos of the right. These ideas also provide an
unsettling example of how art takes on social power by offering an
escape from society. American Literature and the Free Market
presents a new perspective on a number of wide ranging works for
readers of American post-war literature.
For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the
world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry
have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But
as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows,
artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of
our most ambitious writersOCoKeats, Proust, Nabokov, AshberyOCohave
been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that
never gets old, they experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems
and novels become workshops, as fragments of the real world are
scrutinized for insights and the shape of an ideal artwork is
pieced together. These writers, voracious in their appetite for any
knowledge that will further their goal, find help in unlikely
places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the phenomenology of
music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity exchange
furnish them with tools and models for arresting neurobiological
time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in light of
their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary understanding
of some of our most important literature."
The years after World War Two have seen a widespread fascination
with the free market. In this book, Michael W. Clune considers this
fascination in postwar literature. In the fictional worlds created
by works ranging from Frank O'Hara's poetry to nineties gangster
rap, the market is transformed, offering an alternative form of
life, distinct from both the social visions of the left and the
individualist ethos of the right. These ideas also provide an
unsettling example of how art takes on social power by offering an
escape from society. American Literature and the Free Market
presents a new perspective on a number of wide ranging works for
readers of American post-war literature.
For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the
world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry
have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But
as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows,
artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of
our most ambitious writers--Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery--have
been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that
never gets old, they experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems
and novels become workshops, as fragments of the real world are
scrutinized for insights and the shape of an ideal artwork is
pieced together. These writers, voracious in their appetite for any
knowledge that will further their goal, find help in unlikely
places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the phenomenology of
music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity exchange
furnish them with tools and models for arresting neurobiological
time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in light of
their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary understanding
of some of our most important literature.
Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their
students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange,
or insightful-and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention
than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely
disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are
inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social
status. For several decades now, professors have called their work
value-neutral, simply a means for students to gain cultural,
political, or historical knowledge. Michael W. Clune's provocative
book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive
account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic
education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments
about literary value from the practices of interpretation and
analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise.
Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of
dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment,
transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on
psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and
perception, Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats
called "negative capability," the capacity to place existing
criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in
artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by
Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and
Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading-the profession's
traditional key skill-harnesses judgment to open new modes of
perception.
Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their
students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange,
or insightful-and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention
than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely
disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are
inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social
status. For several decades now, professors have called their work
value-neutral, simply a means for students to gain cultural,
political, or historical knowledge. Michael W. Clune's provocative
book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive
account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic
education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments
about literary value from the practices of interpretation and
analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise.
Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of
dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment,
transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on
psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and
perception, Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats
called "negative capability," the capacity to place existing
criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in
artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by
Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and
Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading-the profession's
traditional key skill-harnesses judgment to open new modes of
perception.
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