{"product_id":"flat-aesthetics-twenty-first-century-american-fiction-and-the-making-of-the-contemporary-paperback","title":"Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eChristian Moraru\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e seeks to secure a more granular and ontologically demotic handle on the contemporary in American literature. While contemporaneity can be viewed as \"our\" period, Christian Moraru approaches the contemporary as some-thing \u003ci\u003emade\u003c\/i\u003e by things themselves. The making of the contemporary is variously restaged by the body of fictional prose under scrutiny here. Thus, this corpus itself participates in the making of contemporaneity. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn dialogue with object-oriented ontology and various new materialisms, Moraru contends that the contemporary does not preexist objects or the novels featuring them; it is not their background but 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eTo decipher this signature, \u003ci\u003eFlat Aesthetics\u003c\/i\u003e provides a cross-sectional reading of postmillennial American fiction. Discussed are 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. Organized into five parts, the books canvases objectual constellations of contemporaneity shaped by material dynamics of language, museality and display, spatiality, zombification and thing-rhetoric, and post-anthropocentric kinship.\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eChristian Moraru\u003c\/b\u003e is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. He is the author of eight books, including \u003ci\u003eReading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology \u003c\/i\u003e(2015) and \u003ci\u003eCosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary \u003c\/i\u003e(2011). He is the editor or co-editor of five books, including \u003ci\u003eRomanian Literature as World Literature \u003c\/i\u003e(Bloomsbury, 2018) and \u003ci\u003eThe Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century\u003c\/i\u003e (2015).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 288\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.6 x 9 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e July 25, 2024\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Books by splitShops","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51773375512864,"sku":"9798765101117","price":73.71,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0974\/9764\/5344\/files\/ca3ee3ccac153fc7d81e4f4e7ffe97ee_87d5f7b6-90a9-4633-a53d-4b9b4b753099.webp?v=1780425511","url":"https:\/\/ebocreations.com\/products\/flat-aesthetics-twenty-first-century-american-fiction-and-the-making-of-the-contemporary-paperback","provider":"The E-Book Oasis LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}