Flat Aesthetics

Christian Moraru 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 Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015) and Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011). He is the editor or co-editor of five books, including Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (2015).

• Introduction: The New Aesthetic, the Contemporary, and Compositional CriticismFlat Aesthetics: Things, Forms, and Exchange RegimesFlat Reading: Object Tangles and Criticism without "Us"Contemporaneity, Periodization, and the Signature of the PresentPart I. Languagecap'n crunch, planet of the apes, the kingfishers: Ben Lerner and the Uselessness of Poetrynecklaces, novels, backpacks: A Post is Being Formed in Leaving the Atocha Stationbees, parrot, trains: Murder by Numbers and "the Foulest of Crimes" in The Final SolutionPart II. Displayfreighters, snow globes, comics: Mandel's Museum of Civilization, or Survival Is Insufficientphotographs, instant coffee, baby octopuses: "Mere Objecthood," Messianic Readymates, and the Institute of Totaled Art in 10:04Part III. Exitgo, dog. go! scuba diving, massage chairs: The Dog, X/It-Men, and Other Things That Goravann, doors, cell phones: Un-Telling, "Mocking Objects," and Hamid's Exit WestPart IV. Revenantcopula, ding, assembly: Zombies and the Body Politicscorsica, dust, skels: The Insistence of Things and the Object of Race in Whitehead's Zone OnePart V. Kinshipfish, peacock, ram: Schulz, Blecher, Foer, and Kafka's Unknown Familyhilton, suitcase, ein-sof: Forest Dark and the Machine of Jewish LiteratureConclusion: Composing the ContemporaryNotesBibliography Index

[The] borderline utopic reimagining of the aesthetic as a fully-fledged, situationist-infused apparatus of ‘de-perverting’ objects of all sorts, pushing them outside the fraudulent logic of the transactional and into the pristine domain of their ontological truth, renders Flat Aesthetics commendable, as do its minutely conducted segments of flat reading.