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Reclaiming Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Wang, Wanzheng Michelle
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1435584142

Abstract Details

2015, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
An apparent rift exists between the anti-aesthetic emphasis in postmodern and contemporary literary theory, on the one hand, and readerly appreciations of and engagements with the aesthetic, on the other. This tension between anti-aesthetic critical paradigms and aesthetic experiences of fiction is the central problem I examine in my dissertation. By putting philosophical, aesthetical, narrative, and literary traditions in conversation with each other, I propose a new framework for understanding aesthetic impulses at work in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction by revising Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Schiller’s heuristic tools and categories—which I argue remain pertinent to understanding twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. Drawing on these and other contributions to aesthetic theory, I suggest that post-war fiction is dominantly concerned with the harmonies, engagements, and tensions between what I term the form-drive, the moral-drive, and the sense-drive, in relation to readerly roles and responses. Part I includes two chapters devoted to play, which I characterize as the dominant aesthetic energy that characterizes postmodernist fiction (McHale). My analysis of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) relates to readers’ inhabitation and orientation of the playful, complex ontological worlds of postmodern fiction. I use the tension/conflict between the form- and sense-drives to characterize the aesthetic category of play, and suggest that Marie-Laure Ryan’s possible-worlds theory provides a useful critical apparatus for explicating how the form-drive functions as a system of ordering in readers’ navigations of these ontologically-complex fictional worlds. Part II deals with the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction has reinvigorated traditional aesthetic categories. In chapter three, I use Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1939-40/1967) and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) to demonstrate two different instances of the sublime. Chapter four deals with texts that engage the aesthetic category of the beautiful in very different ways: Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) deals with a more traditional conception of beauty as the harmony of the form- and sense-drives (as conceived by Kant and Schiller); by contrast, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) complicates this classical understanding of beauty by foregrounding the harmony and tension between the form- and moral-drives. Although the three modes do not exhaust the diverse aesthetic energies that characterize post-war literature in English, they can be viewed as junctures that offer us an alternative trajectory for thinking about forms of literary practice during the period in question. If contemporary aesthetic theorists are correct in positing that our experiences of art are ultimately meant to give us a changed sense of the world (Danto) or help us build more well-adapted neurocognitive systems to “revis[e] behavior in an unstable world” (Spolsky), I suggest that exploring the interactions between what James Phelan calls textual and readerly dynamics in the manner I propose here yields fruitful insight into writers’ and readers’ expectations of what literature has to offer to a post-war world devastated by unrelenting violence.
Brian McHale (Advisor)
David Herman (Committee Member)
James Phelan (Committee Member)
323 p.
Aesthetics; American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Ethics; Literature
aesthetics; Kant; beauty; sublime; play; form; moral; postmodern fiction; At Swim-Two-Birds; The Third Policeman; Alasdair Gray, Lanark; Cormac McCarthy; Blood Meridian; Jeanette Winterson; Written on the Body; Kazuo Ishiguro; Never Let Me Go

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Wang, W. M. (2015). Reclaiming Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fiction [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1435584142

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wang, Wanzheng Michelle. Reclaiming Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fiction. 2015. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1435584142.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wang, Wanzheng Michelle. "Reclaiming Aesthetics in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Fiction." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1435584142

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1435584142
966
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.