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Bryan Counter - Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience

Reading Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk

Av Bryan Counter

Del 1 i serien Anthem symploke Studies in Theory

1414 kr

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Beskrivning
This book examines the question of aesthetic experience in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Tom McCarthy and Rachel Cusk in order to propose a reconsideration of aesthetic experience informed by literature and philosophy in equal measure. The introduction suggests an alternative four moments (of aesthetic experience) to Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement, derived in part from my four literary authors respectively: curation, quietness, violence and disconnection. Taken collectively, the four moments show the danger of becoming too invested or interested in aesthetic experience, as well as patience and openness toward the creative act of writing. While these four moments are not meant as determinations, taken together, they offer a picture of aesthetic experience as involuntary, subject to chance and resistant to calculation on the part of the aesthetic subject. Besides contributing to the scholarship on each of the four novelists, this book advances a theory of the aesthetic that shifts away from the framework of judging objects to focus instead on experience and how it is articulated both within and beyond literature. It is here that the theory of aesthetic experience benefits from literature’s singularity: no one text or passage can serve as an example that would adequately circumscribe the field of aesthetic experience, just as no one philosophical example could, and yet the reflective nature of the literary text demands a rigorous look at aesthetic experience without the restrictions of a totalising philosophical system.The two ‘negative’ moments – represented by Huysmans’s À rebours and McCarthy’s Remainder – besides ending poorly for the protagonists, wind up with a foreclosure of aesthetic experience. For Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who attempts to sustain aesthetic experience at will via curation, the fantasy falls apart, leaving him ill and necessitating his dreaded return to society. For McCarthy’s unnamed narrator who is engaged throughout the novel with various projects of re-enactments, the story ends violently, with bloodshed and a plane hijacking. Theoretically, these novels provide a cautionary tale about the impulse to seek out and even domesticate the aesthetic object.On the contrary, the two ‘positive’ moments – represented by Proust’s Recherche and Cusk’s Outline trilogy – each involve narrators and characters who are invested in the creative act of writing. Two particular critically underrepresented passages from Proust can help articulate the ‘quiet’ moment of aesthetic experience: without relying on works of art, they are theoretically compelling in their refusal to theorise themselves, unlike the more popular passages from the novel. Cusk’s novels present the moment of disconnection – that is, the sense of an experience being dislodged from any particular narrative or plot. And yet, each of the characters in question are creative writers, meaning that this everyday feeling of alienation tends to factor into a productive, artistic impulse.In conclusion, these four moments are tied together as they pertain to the nature (and boundaries) of aesthetic experience in general. Just as Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement seem to be grouped in pairs – disinterest and purposiveness without purpose on one hand, and universality and necessity on the other hand – these four moments can be grouped and set apart to help reconsider what we mean when we talk about aesthetic experience.
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Bryan Counter completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo and teaches in the English departments at Western New England University and Framingham State University.

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Four Moments is an eloquent challenge to the notion that an aesthetic experience can be consciously pursued and fetishized. Instead, Counter foregrounds the role played by such elements as chance and nuance. Through his four case studies, he forges an original, exhilarating theory of the aesthetic moment.” —Peter Schwenger, Mount Saint Vincent University, Nova Scotia, Canada.“Through close readings of novels by Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk, Counter offers a lucid and engaging treatment of four moments of aesthetic experience: curation, quietness, violence, and disconnection. This is a work of real theoretical sophistication, consistently insightful in its treatments of literature and philosophy.” —Robert S. Lehman, Boston College, MA, USA.“The question of the aesthetic, long neglected, has become a focus of the current debate about the nature and value of literary study. This important book enhances our understanding of literary art through its original taxonomy of aesthetic effects into four interrelated moments: curation, violence, disconnection, and quietness. These categories are surprising, and enable Counter to discuss familiar concepts in a new way, and to discover neglected aspects of canonical literature. Counter’s aesthetic moments operate as lenses through which familiar works emerge in an entirely new light.” —Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University, OH, USA.“Ingeniously proposing its four moments—idiosyncratic and persuasively presented—Counter's analyses continually turn around paradox (we can see that he has closely read Blanchot) and continually return to crucial junctures, both textual and experiential, in which aesthetic experience loses its bearings, as it always must. Counter articulates this condition of possibility in all its unpredictability, lack of system, and unruly force. This book has a strong argument, but it is not polemical; it is an affirmation, a reminder that “aesthetic experience is alive” and a patient act of reading that maps the unsettled risks, the unforeseeable encounters, and the unsteady returns to which this experience opens. —Jeff Fort, French and Francophone Studies, University of California Davis, USA.Not only does Dr. Bryan Counter give us a new way to read, think, and talk about Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk (no small feat in so crowded an academic space as Proust studies alone)—he offers a new way of reading, thinking, and talking about those enigmatic moments in life when one’s consciousness seems to skip a beat and allow an unbearable lightness of being to unfold within us. An outstanding balance of scholarly rigor and grounded accessibility. — Chris Via, host of Leaf by Leaf."Counter is an energetic and very smart close reader. Even as I suggest some gaps in his reading, it is, in fact, precisely these gaps that mark the space where his own reading finds its energy. If he argues that it is in the gaps and lacunae of narrative that our fascination with the literature begins, there is a nice reciprocity in the fact that this holds true for his own interpretations of that literature." — Jonathan Boulter, Western University, reviewed for The Comparatist"Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience is oddly pleasurable to read. Odd because so much humanities research has been pressurized into conceding its status as such that pretending to be a science rather than an art has become the norm. And pleasurable because of Counter’s contrasting way of valuing aesthetic experience. This is why the book deserves to be read: in a world where the arts and humanities are subject to continual assault, its refusal to behave like a scientific report is warmly to be welcomed." —Hywel Dyx, Bournemouth University, reviewed for Partial Answers

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