Description
- Abstract:
- Untimely Forms is a study of the problem of autonomy in the novel after postmodernism. Recent literary theory has criticized the idea of aesthetic autonomy from various angles: as an elitist ideology of l’art pour l’art, a fantasy of literature’s aggrandized agency, a self-interested positionality within the “literary field”, or the tendency of an obsolete modernism. Such critiques consign autonomy to history, as a discredited idea, an outmoded style, or a set of historical conditions that have been superseded. Untimely Forms contests the account of autonomy that is assumed by such critiques, as well as by contemporary defenders of autonomy such as Michael Fried and Nicholas Brown. It instead theorizes autonomy as a constitutive crisis of form, definition and function emerging from the establishment of art and literature “as such” under capitalism. Drawing on work by Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Rancière and Fredric Jameson, Untimely Forms argues that the problem of autonomy takes on a renewed centrality to the novel in a contemporary age of “world literature”, in which texts circulate transnationally, and in greater isolation from any particular culture or political constituency. Untimely Forms begins by tracing a genealogy of the concept of autonomy within twentieth century literary studies and aesthetic theory, from modernism to postmodernism and recent discussions concerning “world literature”. It distinguishes between theories of autonomy as an “assertion” (Clement Greenberg, Pascale Casanova), and autonomy as a “predicament” (Theodor W. Adorno, Sianne Ngai). Chapter two critiques the narrative of art’s “real subsumption” by capital, and instead theorizes autonomy as a constitutive predicament of the work of art “as such”. Chapter three draws on the work of Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin to theorize the novel form as co-constitutive with, and inseparable from, the problem of art’s autonomy. The second half of the dissertation addresses the predicament of autonomy as it emerges within a range of late-twentieth and twenty-first century novels, by authors including Teju Cole, Chimimanda Ngozie Adichie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, NoViolet Bulawayo, Valeria Luiselli, Karl Ove Knausgaard, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jon Fosse, W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2024
Citation
Byrne, Daniel Sean,
"Untimely Forms: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Literary World-System"
(2024).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:mfhufb5f/
